The Pentagon? Wasting money? Say it ain’t so!
The Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over a six-year period and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable, congressional investigators say.
The department compounded the problem by reimbursing employee claims for tickets bought by the Pentagon, the investigators said.
Swell.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for grandstanding in all this.
“At a time when our soldiers are patrolling the streets of Iraq in unarmored Humvees, and when the Bush Administration is asking for record Defense spending, Secretary (Donald H.) Rumsfeld is letting hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to protect our troops and our country go to waste,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., one of three lawmakers who ordered the studies.
Never mind that half of the time period involved in the study was under a previous administration(one can probably blame Rumsfeld for a lot of things, but blaming him for the actions or inactions of Secty Cohen is probably not quite sporting). And never mind that Rumsfeld’s DoD has had a lot of other things for the last few years to do besides clean up internal accounting processes.
And not to mention that the DoD is one of the largest employers in the world. Not only are there 2.3 million servicefolk out there (some of which end up using civilian aircraft), but there are 700k civilian employees, working in widely dispersed groups and departments, many of which use separate accounting systems and processes. Keeping travel costs under control is a nightmare in most large private firms; I wouldn’t envy anyone trying to tackle the job at the DoD.
Still, $100MM is not chump change. Having had it hit the front pages, one would hope that Rumsfeld will devote some time and money to get the problem fixed. Hopefully that’s not all he’s working on, though.
(via Joe Kelley, SEB, and various others)