CRACKDOWN ON CORRUPTION

The U.S. Customs Service, faced with concerns that its inspectors are
increasingly vulnerable to bribes by drug smugglers, plans to make the
fight against corruption a priority for agency officials.

Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has started to shake up his top
management ranks, strengthen disciplinary procedures and improve
training for employees. He also has asked for authority to use
polygraphs when hiring new agents.

"We will not hesitate to fire people," Kelly told a House subcommittee
last month. A recent Treasury Department review found no evidence of
systematic corruption in the Customs Service but said "individual acts
of corruption have occurred and continue to occur."

The Treasury report said the Office of Internal Affairs at Customs,
which investigates allegations of misconduct by agency employees, had
failed to take aggressive steps to combat corruption and had been
wracked by infighting with the agency's criminal investigators, who
collect intelligence on drug and contraband smugglers and manage the
agency's air and sea drug interdiction programs.

The concerns about corruption among Customs employees comes at a
particularly sensitive time. The Senate Finance Committee, which held
blockbuster hearings on taxpayer abuses by the Internal Revenue
Service in 1997 and 1998, has started an investigation of Customs,
leading to fears among Clinton administration officials that the
agency may be in for a similar battering.

At the House hearing, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) praised Kelly, who
took charge of Customs in August, for taking steps to shake up
Customs. In contrast, Hoyer said, the IRS "was not perceived as acting
internally. . . . If they had, the public would have had more
confidence in their leadership."

Treasury's Office of Professional Responsibility conducted its review
at the request of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees
Customs, chaired by Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), who called for "zero
tolerance" of corruption at the agency.

The review, which provided a rare glimpse into the workings of a
federal law enforcement agency, portrayed Customs as a contentious
workplace.

For example, the Treasury report said, agents assigned to criminal
investigations believe that agents working for Internal Affairs "are
incompetent, overzealous and spend too much time investigating matters
that are unrelated to corruption."

Internal Affairs agents, for their part, said criminal investigators
"interfered, impeded and compromised ongoing Internal Affairs
investigations." The infighting, Treasury said, "has reached critical
proportions."

To address issues raised by Treasury, Kelly said he has replaced the
head of Internal Affairs with a career prosecutor who will report
directly to him. Kelly also has started his own review of Internal
Affairs "and will be directing reassignments when and where
appropriate," he said.

In addition, Kelly said, he has begun new procedures for the reporting
and tracking of employee violations and will establish agency-wide
"discipline review boards," strengthen the agency's whistleblower
office and publish a plain-English "code of conduct" for employees.

Kelly also plans to revamp hiring practices at the agency. Rather than
recruit inspectors and canine officers through field offices, Customs
will hire through a centralized, nationwide office. Job applicants
will take tests to assess reasoning and writing skills, undergo
rigorous interviews to determine their maturity and undergo a
background investigation and drug screening, Kelly said. The new
recruitment program will provide a "systematic approach that includes
ways to gauge integrity in potential new employees," Kelly said.

What remains unclear, however, is the extent of potential corruption
problems facing Kelly. The 98-page Treasury report provides only one
case study, describing how two agents were caught and prosecuted for
their part in a $1 million bribery scheme arranged to smuggle cocaine
from Mexico into the United States.

Asked to provide a tally of how many Customs employees have been
convicted of drug-related crimes in recent years, the agency said its
antiquated computer systems provided "inconclusive data."

Meanwhile, Robert M. Tobias, president of the National Treasury
Employees Union, which represents Customs employees, opposes a
proposal that Customs rotate border inspectors on a regular basis to
reduce the chances that family friends or acquaintances can influence
them to look the other way when contraband or narcotics move through
ports of entry.

Tobias cited the case of Virginia Rodriguez, a Customs inspector and
single parent in Brownsville, Tex., who arrested one of the FBI's top
10 suspects at a border crossing. "She told me recently that she
probably pays more for child care than anyone else in Brownsville in
order to have quality care available for the ever-changing day and
night shifts she works in order to keep the port staffed around the
clock," Tobias said.

He said Customs would have trouble retaining such employees "if they
would have to face the daunting tasks of uprooting their families,
searching for affordable housing and quality child care every couple
of years."