TSA Misconduct Up 26 Percent: Workers Accused of Sleeping on Job, Bribes, and Worse
An increasing number of TSA workers have been sleeping on the job according to a recent government report.
While heightened security measures have gone up, it appears that the quality of service provided by the Transportation Security Administration has gone down. A recent government report reveals that the misconduct of TSA workers has gone up by 26 percent over the past three years.
Airline customers may have more to complain about than just invasive airport screening machines. It appears that the employees responsible for operating those machines have been doing a subpar job. The misconduct report includes categories like "Integrity and Ethics" which would account for bribes and misuse of government ID cards, and "Screening and Scanning" which would account for not scanning all customers or sleeping on the job. Some of the offenses could be even more serious.
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"There's not even a way to properly report some of the offenses, so this may be just the tip of the iceberg of some of the offenses," Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican and longtime critic of the TSA who ordered the audit, told CNN.
Last year a TSA worker in Maryland was sentenced two years in prison for the possession of child pornography. In 2010 a former TSA worker was sentenced to three years' probation for stealing laptop computers from passengers' luggage at the Philadelphia International Airport.
Mica has questioned what the TSA is doing to resolve the issue.
"Why are there so many cases and, then, what is TSA doing about that?" he asked CNN. "The report says they can't really get a handle on it. That raises a lot of issues."
The union representing the TSA has stated that the numbers reflect a small amount of workers in comparison to the number of people they employ.
"If you look at a population the size of a small city -- 56,000 people in this work force -- and the numbers then on an annual basis are then really, really small," David Borer of the American Federation of Government Employees said, according to the news agency.
