Agriculture Dept. Billed for Prison Calls

WASHINGTON —  Prison inmates from North Carolina to New Jersey have billed the Agriculture Department for long-distance telephone calls, making at least 500 collect calls to its Washington headquarters in four months, officials said Friday.

Many of the callers were connected to long-distance numbers outside the department.

No dollar figure has been put on the improper calls, the cost of which will be borne by the telephone companies, not the taxpayers. Nor was it clear whether government workers were duped or helped make the fraudulent calls, although one temporary worker was required to repay the department for some of the calls.

The chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Republican Dick Lugar of Indiana, suggested that other government agencies and departments also may have been cheated. But he said lax controls plague the department’s phone system, which receives 23,000 bills from 1,500 phone systems nationwide. About 11,000 people work for the department in and near Washington.

The congressional General Accounting Office spotted the problem in an audit requested by Lugar and undertaken a year ago.

Lugar’s staff gave some details of the audit, still under way, and said the 500 collect calls were made in December 1994, and in January, July and August of last year.

The department’s Office of Administration had also turned up the bills during a routine examination late in 1994, said Anne F. Thomson Reed, deputy assistant secretary for administration.

She said most of the calls were billed by inmates to department numbers. She suggested that some of the local telephone companies where the calls originated did not ask the department for authorization before charging the calls.

The department has since arranged with Bell Atlantic Corp., the billing agent for the department’s two long-distance carriers, to block calls from the main source--the District of Columbia’s Lorton Correctional Complex in Lorton, Va.

Other calls, according to the department and Lugar’s office, came from jails and prisons in Fort Dix, N.J.; Alexandria, Bowling Green, Culpeper and Fairfax, Va.; Montgomery, Pa.; Leonardtown, Upper Marlboro and Waldorf, Md.; and New Bern and Bayboro, N.C.

Reed said one employee, hired as a temporary worker, was forced to repay the government for phone calls charged by an inmate. Reed did not give a specific amount.