One of the massive problems of trying to aid people and agencies in the aftermath of a disaster is that there is so little time and so few resources to monitor where help is channeled and whether the recipients are legitimate.

Almost immediately there are incidents of fraud, theft, deceit and outright robbery of aid diverted from those who need it most. How many times recently have we seen such agencies as the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, in effect, ripped off by criminals? By the time the abuses are discovered, it is too late to recoup the aborted funds and get them where they belong.

We heard story after story about how funds intended for families of victims from the 9-11 assaults in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania never reached those families.

Now we are finding that federal FEMA people, already under justifiable fire, were parties to the improper doling out of some $1.4 billion of individual aid after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast.

There are the usual alibis that “it’s not as bad as it looks” and the thefts “represent a fraction of the overall assistance provided.” But $1.4 billion is a massive amount of money that could have done a lot of good for very needy people.

The Government Accountability Office used a statistical analysis to estimate the fraud and it says at least 16 percent – one dollar out of every six – of the individual assistance after the two hurricanes last year was “misdirected.”

The GAO has decided that FEMA was conned into paying for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a sex change operation, among other things. Prison inmates made scores, and one person used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address. One man spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel, thanks to an effective scam and our tax dollars at work.

The kicker is that once a person or group gets such aid money, there is no control over how it is spent, no accountability whatever. Even worse, officials have provided a copy of a $2,358 U.S. Treasury check for rental assistance that an undercover agent received by using a fake address. The money was spent even after FEMA learned from its inspector that the undercover applicant did not live at the address.

In FEMA’s defense – and it needs a lot of defense considering its faulty modes of operation in recent years – it is important to get funding to needy people as quickly as possible.

“Even as we put victims first, we take very seriously our responsibility to be outstanding stewards of taxpayer dollars, and we are careful to make sure that funds are distributed appropriately,” says Aaron Walker of FEMA.

Just about anything that’s done will represent a comeback here.

FEMA now has identified more than 1,500 cases of probable fraud and theft after Katrina and Rita. What is being done to establish accountability processes to prevent similar fraud in future disasters?

Such safeguards may lead to slower distribution of funds to the needy, but consider how many people will get nothing if the system continues to allow criminals to rip it off the way they did after the 2005 hurricane disasters.