"What's this, Huma, a leave slip. That's OK-just go."
Anyone who has worked for the government knows what a serious allegation this is against Clinton aide and wife of Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin. Already under suspicion for improperly having outside employment while she was a State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton, Abedin is now alleged to have improperly collected almost $10,000 from the government for sick leave and vacation time she never claimed.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/08/01/top-clinton-aide-reportedly-received-overpayments-at-state-department/?intcmp=hpbt2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-clinton-aide-accused-of-receiving-overpayments-at-state-department/2015/07/31/978d622a-3794-11e5-9739-170df8af8eb9_story.html
Being retired from the Justice Department, I can tell you there is a provision that unused sick and vacation time can be reimbursed upon retirement. That's why you submit leave slips when you take days off or are sick. To commit a fraud upon the government to the tune of $10,000 would surely result in a firing and prosecution.
But that was for us common folks,. As everybody knows, normal rules have never applied to the Clintons and their gang.
And to top it all off, Senator Grassley believes that evidence of this malfeasance is contained-guess where- in Hillary's private e-mail server. (Find it if you can.) Just another reason why Hillary used a private email server rather than a government server-for convenience sake, of course.
4 comments:
And, Huma gets a free "Get out of jail" card.
Squid
How do you "collect" money you never "claimed"? It not like your immediate supervisor across the hall signs the checks, or disburses cash from a leather bag. They come from a department full of financial gnomes half way across Washington D.C. who have no idea who you are. If the paperwork to claim it doesn't come across their desk and get entered in their computer, no check is issued.
Siarlys obviously does not understand the process. I will try to 'splain it to him.
What appears to have happened here, or is at least alleged, is that Abedin "collected" money for leave (not money)which she actually took but never officially "claimed" (applied for), resulting in overpayment.
I find it impossible to believe that an individual could work for four consecutive years without encountering a single situation which would involve the requirement to take at least an hour, or a couple of hours, or a half-day, or a day, or more, of either sick/vacation time, particularly when a pregnancy/birth is involved as was apparently/reportedly the case here. I know I never did, and I would betcha that neither Gary, nor Siarlys, nor anybody that any of us know, did either.
The problem is that when you take leave/time off but do not properly document it with a leave slip or whatever, as Abedin apparently/reportedly did, your leave balances keep going up rather than decreasing by the amount of leave taken. As a result, when you resign/retire and claim reimbursement for unused leave, you are "overpaid" in a check, which includes payment for actual bona fide unused leave as well as for the number of hours of leave that you should have applied for but actually did not, resulting in them still improperly being on the books.
In this particular instance, the figure of $10K is tossed about. If that is not fairly significant fraud, I don't know what is. Hillary's culpability would be that she knowingly did not require Abedin to apply for leave when appropriate and then signed off on the reimbursement (which would be the norm) or, maybe alternatively, that she did not know (or care??) when her immediate subordinate was working and when she was not.
See??
Oh, you mean she took leave, did not report she was taking the leave, so it appeared on the books that she never took the leave, so she was able to obtain payment for accumulated leave not taken? Well why didn't they just say that? It would be interesting to know what evidence there is for something that is not on the books, as opposed to something that is.
As for my personal experience, I haven't worked at a job where I had sick leave, and my vacation was always picked at the beginning of the year, and locked in. That was the week (or two) I could take, and I was not working that week, when it came around. If I had quit or been fired before the vacation time came up, I wouldn't have been paid for it either.
For now, I think the operative word is "tossed about." Surely someone could post some pdf's with the evidence?
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