Abstract This paper addresses the FBI and its agents lacking funds to live in major cities where they must work. The major issue is the lack of control within the FBI and the risk that agents will fall to corruption.

Introduction

With the FBI in dangerous territory due to budget restrictions and funding issues, the fear that the Director faces is one that could undermine the entire Bureau. If the Bureau cannot afford to pay its agents fair wages, those agents—who are privy to all manner of intelligence—become susceptible to fraud, bribery, kickbacks, and other types of corruption just to make ends meet. Already this is being seen with cases of FBI agents like Robert Lustyik, convicted of bribery (Clark, 2015; Huynh, 2015). Preventing this type of situation would be the best type of control to implement, as the situation presented in the case given to the Director is what that calls for immediate preventive action. However, concurrent controls and feedback controls might also be of use in the situation. Regardless, the present budgetary issues that the FBI agent cannot be fixed simply and the problem exists at a much more fundamental level: the FBI is having an image crisis; its brand has been damaged considerably (most recently in the Russiagate scandal surrounding the Trump Administration). Former FBI Director James Comey’s brush-it-under-the-rug approach to the Clinton-Lynch tarmac scandal on top of Clinton’s email/servergate scandal—on top of the Uranium One scandal (Solomon, 2017), along with the Clinton Foundation scandal—has all culminated in the FBI becoming one of the least trustworthy “deep state” apparatuses in the country (Scott, 2017). In order to obtain the public funding it needs to keep its agents adequately paid and to keep them from going rogue just in order to make ends meet, the FBI has to clean up its image, reshape its brand, and begin to appeal to the public once more. If the FBI can enhance its image, it is more likely to obtain more public funding in the future and thereby prevent its agents from veering towards corruption.

Major Issues

The major issues in this case are that the FBI is depleted of funds to adequately pay its agents. It is depleted of funds because it is...

The FBI has a “trust” issue as far as the public is concerned, and that translates into legislators being less willing to hand over more tax payer dollars to the Bureau.
Law enforcement is incredibly monopolistic—but among law enforcement agencies, it is also incredibly and fiercely competitive. Agencies are competing for federal funding; they even hold fundraisers in order to obtain the type of money they need just to keep operations going (FTC, 2016). The CIA had the Marshall Plan with its deep pockets to help get the Cold War running. The FBI in the 21st century is not so fortunate. Its reputation has come under more and more scrutiny ever since 9/11—which it failed to prevent, leaving many constituents wondering what good an investigative agency was that could not even identify a group of terrorists plotting the greatest terror attack on U.S. soil in U.S. history. The rise of power of the NSA and DHS following 9/11 further exacerbated the FBI’s issues, drawing much needed funds away from the Bureau and depleting its coffers. Now the Bureau finds itself in a death spiral: the less it is able to pay its agents, the more likely the nation is to see repeats of reputation-blacking incidents like Lustyik’s. The more those occur, the less favorable the Bureau is going to appear to the public. The less favorable it appears, the less likely it is to have more public funds earmarked for its operations. It is a death spiral that ends in total collapse—and the current trend is only getting worse as the Russiagate fiasco continues to play out with nothing to show for it but the obvious free pass given to one of the country’s most corrupt politicians.

Control

Three types of controls that relate to this case are: 1) preventive, 2) concurrent, and 3) feedback. Preventive controls are also known as feedforward controls, which enable a Director to identify and prevent problems ahead of time—i.e., before they become worse problems that will negatively impact the whole firm. Preventive controls could be utilized in this situation in terms…