Have you ever awakened in the morning dreading another monotonous day at a job that you hate? Have you ever fantasized about faking a sudden illness, taking a personal day—or how about a personal year?

Maybe book a flight to Bermuda and spend a few months eating pineapple and getting massages on the beach? Or perhaps better yet, tell your boss you're a CIA spook on a top-secret mission, so you won't be showing up at the office for some indeterminate length of time.

Chances are, these are just idle fantasies that you quickly snap out of as you blink your way back into reality... unless, of course, you work for the US Government where you might just get away with it.

Senior policy advisor John C. Beale of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Air and Radiation pulled off a million dollar con in which he found a fix for his career doldrums by convincing his bosses that he was a top-secret CIA operative.

This required him to be out of the office for extended periods of time—claiming to be traveling the globe on clandestine missions in the interest of homeland security.

Yes, this EPA official was vicariously acting out some sort of James Bond fantasy instead of going to work—and getting paid for it. 1 He occupied his time taking lavish vacations on the government's dime.

Beale took 33 airplane trips between 2003 and 2011, costing the government $266,190. On 70 percent of those, he traveled first class and stayed in five-star hotels, traveled by limo, and charged more than twice the government's allowed per diem limit.

Between vacations, he would just putter around his Northern Virginia home doing pretty much nothing at all—and certainly not working. Beale told one shameless lie after another.

For example, in order to be granted a handicap parking space, he claimed to have contracted malaria in Vietnam. However, not only did he never have malaria, he never served in Vietnam! 2 How long would you guess he got away with this fraudulent scheme—a month? A year? Try two decades!

For well over 10 years and possibly closer to 20, Beale was able to collect his salary—as well as his regular bonuses—while performing almost no work, bilking the government out of close to a million dollars.

Court documents trace his fabrications back through 2000, but additional evidence suggests he may have been lying and manipulating as far back as 1989.

The man was no slouch. A graduate of NYU and Princeton, Beale was making $206,000 a year, making him the highest paid official at the EPA—including the administrator. Pulling off such an elaborate scheme on such a massive scale is quite complicated and requires the skills of a master con. As Michelle Cottle writes in the Daily Beast: 3

"You gotta admit: As crackpot lies go, Beale's spy cover was a stroke of genius. Whenever someone grew suspicious about his work activities (or lack thereof),

Beale could simply whip out the national security card: I'd love to tell you why I haven't been at work the past six months, but then I'd have to kill you."

Once caught, Beale admitted to his elaborate deception and on December 18, 2013, was sentenced to 32 months in federal prison and payment of nearly 1.4 million dollars restitution. 4

But why did it take more than a decade for the EPA to realize their highest paid climate specialist was not really a CIA agent—in fact, he had no relationship with the CIA at all, not even a security clearance. How did such an elaborate scheme ever escape notice?

Two new reports by the EPA Inspector General's office concluded that the agency "enabled" Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories, and failed to check out hundreds of thousands of dollars him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses.

Inspector General Arthur Elkins said Beale was able to get away with it due to "an absence of basic internal controls at the EPA."2 Prosecutor Jim Smith said Beale's crimes made him a "poster child for what is wrong with government," a statement prompting immediate investigations by two congressional committees into the EPA, including EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who was Beale's immediate boss.

This was not the first EPA scandal of 2013. EPA official Robert Brenner was scrutinized for accepting an $8,000 discount on a luxury car arranged by a lobbyist. And in the wake of the Beale scandal, another high-level EPA official is under scrutiny for allegedly approving expenses for Beale—an official also under the direction of Gina McCarthy.

Evidence suggests EPA knew as early as 2010 that Beale's story was false, yet did not take action. Congressman Darrell Issa said these EPA cases "raise serious questions about McCarthy's capabilities as a manager and leader." 5 This problem, unfortunately, is much larger than one government official or agency. The Beale scandal is just one more example of waste, fraud, and general corruption within the US government.

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The EPA cannot keep your money safe, much less make the environment safe. Some of the EPA's high-level employees have come from the same companies the EPA is supposed to regulate—they've become a revolving door for industry. The two largest private sector sources for EPA positions are Monsanto and Waste Management Inc. Since 1970, at least 12 high-level EPA employees have come from one of these two companies, including William Ruckelshaus, Linda Fisher, and Lidia Watrud. 6, 7

EPA also has a history of being caught in money laundering schemes. Take, for example, former EPA project manager Gordon McDonald who was convicted in 2009 for rigging bids, accepting kickbacks totaling 1.5 million dollars, and funneling big payoffs to insiders via an EPA "superfund" in New Jersey. 8, 9

And you may recall the EPA "warehouse" scandal in Landover earlier in 2013. An EPA warehouse had been converted into a swanky man-cave housing a sizeable athletic center, complete with cushy furniture and televisions and a nicely stocked fridge. All of this was, of course, carefully hidden from security cameras by partitions and piles of strategically stacked boxes. 10

Even more disturbing is the fact that EPA doles out hundreds of millions of dollars per year to certain organizations of their choice with no accountability, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Sometimes these funds are directed to organizations for non-environmental purposes. 11 Other branches of government are even more irresponsible—including the Pentagon itself. As written in this Reuters Special Report: 12

"The Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output last year."