Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich is seeking goverment paperwork on a $3.62 billion bonus package that Merrill Lynch paid its top executives in the last quarter of 2008, after the financial services firm lost more than $15 billion and was informed it would get $10 billion in federal bailout money.

Merrill Lynch's bonuses were 22 times larger than the $165 million bonuses AIG paid its executives, Kucinich noted in letters sent today to Federal Reserve Bank Chaiman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Department official Neel Kashkari, and Ken Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, which acquired Merrill Lynch.

"In contrast to the bonuses awarded by AIG, the Merrill bonuses constituted a significant proportion of allocated TARP funds, which were not locked into place by preexisting contract and were performance, not retention, in nature," Kucinich said in the letter which mentioned the House Oversight subcommittee he chairs is probing the issue.

Kucinich said the payments raise "significant questions" about the information shared with the federal officials who oversaw the merger between the two financial institutions.

"If ordinary BOA shareholders were ignorant of the details of the Merrill bonus arrangement, was the U.S. government as well?" asked Kucinich. He said the answers he obtains "will be of interest to the American public, who are rightly concerned about how recipient firms have used TARP monies, and how well the Federal Government has monitored the use of those funds and safeguarded them from waste and abuse."