When Barack Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill forced the $800 billion stimulus bill into law, they insisted that waste, fraud, and abuse would not be tolerated. They put “Sheriff” Joe Biden on the case in March 2009, with Obama warning stimulus recipients that “around the White House, we call him the Sheriff — because if you’re misusing taxpayer money, you’ll have to answer to him.” The Department of Transportation employees gathered for the speech laughed at that statement, according to the White House transcript — and well they should have. An in-depth report from McClatchy and ProPublica shows that the ARRA lost billions of dollars to employment fraud, and that government agencies collaborated in the effort rather than crack down on it:

The largest government infusion of cash into the U.S. economy in generations – the 2009 stimulus – was riddled with a massive labor scheme that harmed workers and cheated unsuspecting American taxpayers. At the time, government regulators watched as money slipped out the door and into the hands of companies that rob state and federal treasuries of billions of dollars each year on stimulus projects and other construction jobs across the country, a yearlong McClatchy investigation found. A review of public records in 28 states uncovered widespread cheating by construction companies that listed workers as contractors instead of employees in order to beat competitors and cut costs. The federal government, while cracking down on the practice in private industry, let it happen in stimulus projects in the rush to pump money into the economy at a time of crisis. Companies across the country avoided state and federal taxes and undercut law-abiding competitors. They exploited workers desperate for jobs, depriving them of unemployment benefits and often workers’ compensation insurance. Exactly how much tax revenue was forfeited on stimulus projects isn’t clear. This is: The government enabled businesses bent on breaking the rules. Regulators squandered the chance to right a rogue industry by forcing companies’ hands on government jobs.

And guess what? The fraud continues to this day. It’s not that the government is unaware of the problem; they regularly force private businesses to comply with employment law when it comes to restaurants and nail salons, McClatchy notes. When it comes to contractors working on ARRA-related jobs, they suddenly develop very convenient blind spots.

Guess who else it impacts? Unions, which normally would represent employees:

“So we the taxpayers are paying the tax cheaters who are exploiting their workers and stealing work from law-abiding employers?” said Matt Capece, a lawyer with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, after reviewing payroll records collected by McClatchy. “No wonder the bad guys are running roughshod over the industry,” he said.

Yes, the “bad guys” — from the government, here to “help” as always. Well, help themselves, anyway. These contractors who misclassified employees as contractors got away without paying workers comp and tax withholding, the latter of which is especially ironic. Obama and the Democrats insisted that the $800 billion in the ARRA would promote hiring and increase tax revenues, but as this report shows, in many cases it did neither.

Oh, don’t forget that the Department of Labor spent $80 million of that stimulus money to protect workers, while HUD apparently couldn’t have cared less:

Of all 1,278 investigations that Labor Department wage and hour officials opened for stimulus projects from 2010 to 2013, investigators found wage and hour violations 62 percent of the time. Not eight blocks away, their counterparts at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed stimulus money to thousands of companies to build housing for the poor. Only a few of these projects had federal labor inspectors checking behind the local officials HUD trained to spot wage violations.

Be sure to read it all, and then re-read the Boss Emeritus’ column from nearly two years ago on the same topic:

Kudos to McClatchy and ProPublica for this expose’ now, but … where was the media two years ago when voters could have used this information?