The Environmental Protection Agency had lax protections to keep employees from misusing travel dollars, and one administrator may have misused almost $69,000 of taxpayer funds to pay for personal trips, according to an independent investigator.
A report from the EPA’s inspector general released Tuesday showed more than one-fifth of the EPA’s offices were not in compliance with management integrity standards set by the agency. That lack of compliance allowed some agency employees to take advantage of the agency’s travel policies.
“Insufficient implementation of current travel policies and internal controls result in EPA travel dollars being vulnerable to fraud, waste and misuse,” the report stated.
According to investigators, one of those individuals was Wayne Nastri, former administrator for Region 9 of the EPA, who served from 2001 until 2008 and was appointed by former President George W. Bush. Region 9 area covers much of California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada and the Pacific Islands.
The report examined 88 trips Nastri made between Oct. 2006 and Jan. 2009. During that time, Nastri made 51 trips on the agency’s dime to the Orange County/Los Angeles County area, which is near where he lived. He traveled home almost every weekend, per the report.
Nastri claimed personal mileage and parking fees on those trips and the trips cost taxpayers about $69,000 — 59 percent of the total $132,337.59 Nastri claimed on all 88 trips. Investigators are still examining how much of the $69,000 may have been wasted.
Investigators did confirm that Nastri claimed at least $3,800 in ineligible travel fees, and called the amount of trips “excessive.”
“The former Region 9 Administrator stayed at his residence, and claimed meals and incidental expenses,” the report stated, “as well as mileage for his privately owned vehicle to commute to the Los Angeles Field Office and/or wherever necessary. His residence was about 55 miles from the EPA’s Los Angeles Field Office.”
Under the subsequent administrator for Region 9, travel to Orange County/Los Angeles County decreased significantly. Only seven trips were made to the same area between 2009 and 2011, costing $5,705.
The large discrepancy between the amount of trips between the two administrators called into question “whether the travel of the former Region 9 Administrators was essential to the performance of the agency mission.”
Nastri, in a statement to the Washington Examiner released by a spokesman, said he was not contacted by the investigators prior to the report’s publication. He would have been happy to talk with them about their findings, he said.
“I was not provided an opportunity to review the EPA OIG report before it was released publically. I have not been provided any of the documents on which the allegations are allegedly based,” Nastri said.
He said he’s not sure what documents were used to form the inspector general’s report because he was not shown any of the documents. Nastri added that his expenses were subject to regular and thorough review, and were audited by agency employees.
“I am confident that a fair and collaborative process will produce an accurate result,” he said, “and I will responsibly resolve this matter.”
Elsewhere, investigators found inadequate justification for lodging above per diem, trip reports not always submitted after international travel, vouchers not submitted within the required time frame, and incomplete annual reporting to the GSA on premium class travel.
Of the 210 trips the investigators reviewed, 32, or 15 percent, of them didn’t have adequate justification for employees spending more on their lodging than their per diem allowed. Thirty percent of trips that cost more than $5,000 didn’t have adequate justification for going above the per diem, the report stated.
The investigators also reviewed 98 international trips and found 58 percent of them didn’t have the necessary trip reports completed. After the investigators brought this to the EPA’s attention, the agency began requiring the completion of international travel reports.
In the report, the EPA made no comment about Nastri’s travel. In responding to the findings about inadequate justification for spending above the per diem rate, EPA representatives said it was “unclear” what the investigators considered “adequate justification for lodging above per diem.”
The inspector general’s report providedd14 recommendations for improving oversight over travel expenses and the EPA has since implemented all of them, the report stated.
