The Department of Interior’s (DOI) Office of Inspector General has placed a Fish and Wildlife Service official on leave following an investigation into his mismanagement of federal grants to benefit a family member.

The OIG report states:

Richard Ruggiero, Chief of the Division of International Conservation (DIC), International Affairs, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), may have violated Federal ethics regulations when he issued a cooperative agreement and was involved in two grants to nonprofit organizations with which a family member was associated. We found that Ruggiero violated Federal laws and regulations by participating in an FWS cooperative agreement that financially benefited his family member, and neither Ruggiero nor his family member disclosed their relationship in writing to the FWS. Ruggiero also shared nonpublic FWS information about the agreement with his family member the report states.

“This Inspector General Report identified exactly the kind of mismanagement and tax dollar abuse I have been concerned about and I am looking to root out at Interior,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a statement after the report was released this week.

“When I arrived last year, I asked for a briefing on our grants programs, and, shockingly, not a single person could tell me definitively how much the Department disburses in grants every year and what projects we are funding,” Zinke said. “That’s not because the people I asked are not smart, it’s because the bureaucracy is so big and there’s so little oversight.”

“The previous administration created an environment that was so unaccountable that it led to bad actors taking advantage of taxpayers in plain sight,” Zinke said. “Our review of grants and cooperative agreements I believe will expose the waste and abuse while also directing that money to important priorities like expanding access to public lands and wildlife conservation.”

Last year, Zinke ordered a department-wide review of large grants and cooperative agreements, including hiring a senior adviser who has thirty years of management experience in banking and financial institutions to oversee the review, according to DOI.

The grant awards and extensions were related to the International Fund for Animal Welfare beginning in 2014.

DOI said Ruggiero is on administrative leave pending a disciplinary decision. The mismanagement took place during his tenure with former President Barack Obama’s administration.

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