From CBS:
Muffins: $16 apiece. Coffee: more than a dollar an ounce. Snacks: $32 per person.
A report issued Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general found excessive spending on food and beverages in an audit of 10 department conferences.
Justice spent about $490,000 on food and beverages at the conferences — more than 10 percent of the $4.4 million total cost of the events.
In response, the Justice Department concurred with the IG's recommendations to more closely monitor costs.
The department hosted or participated in 1,832 conferences in 2008 and 2009, costing $121 million.
The DOJ may be soft on corporate criminals, but it's got the $16 muffins.
Many of the corporations responsible for nearly bringing down the global economy escaped prosecution because of a set of guidelines adopted by the Justice Department in summer 2008. The New York Times recently reported on the effect of this “softer approach” to white-collar crime. The guidelines were well-known to federal prosecutors but not to the public at large, and help explain “the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis
Take that $121 million the DOJ used for those 1,832 conferences, and put that money towards prosecuting and bringing to justice the corporate criminals that brought down the world economy.