Posted March 30, 2017 6:33 am by Comments

By Christen Smith

A confidential informant who quit after one year working along the U.S.-Mexican border. (Photo: Fox News)
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lacks “adequate oversight” of the money it pays to confidential informants, according to a federal audit released Tuesday.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General identified multiple issues with the ATF’s management of more than 1,800 confidential informants between 2012 and 2015 — including a clunky system of tracking payments made to the informants while working on investigations for the agency.
“The DOJ OIG’s review found that while ATF’s CI policies were generally aligned with the Attorney General’s Guidelines Regarding the Use of Confidential Informants (AG Guidelines), its oversight of its CI Program required significant improvement,” the office said in a press release Tuesday. “Because of the deficiencies we identified, we concluded that ATF was not able to administer its CI Program in a manner that is reflective of the importance of the program, or its risks.”
According to the audit, control agents record payments made to informants through a paper trail of hard-copy documents “scattered” in multiple investigative files with no automated way of sorting through the information when necessary.
“We spoke with several control agents to determine whether

Source: Guns.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.