A General Services Administration watchdog said significant risks remain for fraud and abuse in the agency’s charge card program despite multiple calls for its reform in recent years.
A report released Monday by the GSA’s inspector general said the agency has yet to establish an effective system for providing explanations for questionable purchases by its employees and for cutting off the accounts of those who no longer work at the federal government’s housekeeping agency.
Despite the findings, the report said the IG’s auditors don’t plan to review the charge card program in 2015 because the agency’s travel spending levels don’t hit the $10 million threshold that requires an investigation.
GSA travel spending came under fire in 2012 when a report revealed officials had charged hundreds of thousands of dollars in frivolous expenditures to their travel cards for a 2010 Las Vegas conference. Former GSA Regional Administrator Jeffrey Neely, who oversaw the conference, was indicted last week by a federal grand jury on multiple charges involving improper travel expenses.
The GSA introduced the current charge card system, under which travel expenses are billed, in 1984 in order to streamline the government’s purchase process.
While the charge card program is administered by the GSA, more than 350 federal entities use the system. Individual travel card users are technically liable for their own expenses while on official business, but they are routinely reimbursed by their departments and agencies.
In March, the Washington Examiner reported postal service officials had used their travel cards to withdraw cash for gambling, pay themselves salary advances and even to let their children go bowling.
But abuse of the travel card system isn’t limited to the post office or the GSA; reports have found evidence of such fraud across the federal government for years.
In 2008, the Government Accountability Office released a report saying 41 percent of all government purchases made using travel cards could not be properly verified. Two years later, another GAO report found that 10 percent of cardholders made a “delinquent” purchase at least once.
For example, a Treasury Department inspector general report found an office within the department shelled out more than $13,000 on a trip to Hawaii.
In order to secure approval for the trip, officials lied to the Office of Public Affairs by saying Hawaii was the best location for an awards ceremony — not Minnesota or South Dakota, the other places under consideration — because their director already had speaking engagements on the books in Hawaii for the week of the ceremony. The report reveals this was not the case.
Snippets of internal emails included in the report showed Treasury officials discussed the unfavorable “optics” of the Hawaii trip in the face of increased congressional scrutiny of travel spending before green-lighting the expense anyway.
A 2012 NASA IG report found that space agency officials handed out travel cards to far more employees than were needed, giving some the authority to approve their own travel expenses. The 45 officials whose travel expenditures did not require review racked up more than $500,000 in unchecked travel bills in a one-year period.
In other examples found by government investigators over the years, Department of Housing and Urban Development officials were discovered to have more than one travel card account to mask purchases, and at the State Department, auditors discovered officials were abusing their ability to book first-class tickets and others were claiming reimbursements for airline tickets they never used.
