WASHINGTON – The Associated Press reported that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents with the “acting without authorization conducted dozens of undercover investigations of illegal tobacco sales, misused some of $162 million in profits from the stings and lost track of at least 420 million cigarettes,” the Department of Justice’s inspector general said.

The news source says that in one case, ATF agents sold $15 million in cigarettes and later “turned over $4.9 million in profits from the sales to a confidential informant — even though the agency did not properly account for the transaction.”

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz 53-page audit described widespread lack of ATF oversight and inadequate paperwork in the agency's "churning investigations," undercover operations that use proceeds from illicit cigarette sales to pay for the ATF's costs, writes the AP.

The audit cited a 2009 sting operation that didn’t have approval from the government, a case where ATF officials allowed a tobacco distributor working as an ATF confidential informant to keep $4.9 million in profits from cigarette sales to criminal suspects. The ATF officials justified this by saying the $4.9 covered the informant's expenses.

Overall, the inspector general said “shoddy documentation and inventory controls made it impossible to account for more than 2.1 million cartons of cigarettes — totaling 420 million cigarettes — during at least 20 separate ATF sting operations.”

The estimated the retail value of those cigarettes, writes the AP is about $127 million.