The Government Accountability Office found that major worker safety, health, and rights violators hide among the federal government’s most lucrative contract awardees. A new GAO report shows that the government awarded contracts to firms after they were cited for violations or fined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the federal agency responsible for worker rights issues like back wages and child labor.

Some of the contractors GAO reviewed are receiving the big bucks. In FY 2009 alone, the USDA, Pentagon, and Department of Justice awarded about $500 million to a food supplier that had been cited by OSHA more than 100 times since 2005. WHD and a federal jury found that the same supplier had failed to properly pay its workers.

The report reveals the perils of poor information sharing within government. You have some labor law violation data over here and contractor award data over there, but agencies are not making the proper connections – and that leaves, in this case, workers at risk. (The GAO report also showed that some of the scofflaw contractors violated other laws, including environmental laws.) Nor can the public use available data to link contractors to their labor or environmental records.

Even GAO, the government’s official auditor, ran into trouble: “GAO’s analysis was limited to the 50 largest [Wage and Hour Division] assessments and OSHA penalties, which GAO manually searched. Because of this, the full extent of the federal government’s contracts awarded to companies cited for labor violations is not known.”

The White House is aware that unscrupulous employers are making off with mountains of taxpayer dollars, and Vice President Biden appears to be developing a so-called High Road contracting policy. Thus far, the White House has focused its ire on employers who don’t pay fair wages and don’t provide adequate benefits.

But, as the Center for American Progress and others have argued, a High Road contracting policy also ought to limit, or even ban, contracting dollars for occupational safety and health violators, polluters in violation of environmental laws, food facilities or product manufacturers that put consumers at risk, and tax cheats. Bottom line: Taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to subsidize illegal behavior, especially behavior that puts those same taxpayers in harm’s way.