Report: State Department failed to justify premium travel
Of $140 million spent on first-class travel over 18 months, 67 percent was not properly authorized.
Two-thirds of the $140 million spent by State Department officials for premium-class travel tickets over a year and a half was not properly authorized or justified, according to a new report from auditors.
Senior agency executives improperly approved blanket authorizations for a number of the 32,000 first or business class tickets purchased between April 2003 and September 2004, the Government Accountability Office reported. Those tickets accounted for nearly half of the department's $286 million in travel expenses during that period.
The report (GAO-06-298) found that subordinates of agency executives, who said they could not challenge the use of first-class travel, signed off on most of the blanket premium-class travel ticket authorizations.
GAO said during most of fiscal years 2003 and 2004, 17 executives spent more than $1 million on first-class tickets. Many of the department's top officials -- undersecretaries and assistant secretaries -- regularly used premium-class travel regardless of the flight's length, the report said. Federal and department travel regulations permit first-class travel under limited circumstances, including for nonstop flights lasting longer than 14 hours.
"Because premium-class tickets typically cost substantially more than coach tickets, improper premium-class travel represents a waste of tax dollars," the 58-page report, released Monday to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, stated.
For example, GAO found that a family of four flying from Washington to Moscow on official agency business spent a total of $6,712 for the 12-hour flight when the cost of coach-class tickets would have been $1,784.
The State Department lacked complete data on premium-class travel, performed little to no monitoring of this travel and treated premium-class travel as a benefit for working for the department, GAO said. The agency challenged the assertion that premium travel was seen as a benefit.
Recommendations to improve control included requiring premium-class travel audits, requiring premium authorization from individuals of at least equal rank and prohibiting blanket authorizations for premium-class travel.
The State Department also failed to authorize the process for obtaining refunds for more than $6 million in airline tickets that went unused. The department was unaware of that oversight until notified by GAO because the department does not monitor travelers' adherence to regulations or attempt to identify unused tickets, the report stated.
State Department spokeswoman Susan Pittman said GAO overstated the nature and extent of the problem. She characterized the report's title, "Internal Control Breakdowns and Ineffective Oversight Lost Taxpayers Tens of Millions of Dollars," as misleading.
Nevertheless, she said, the department is "firmly committed to aggressive stewardship of the taxpayers' resources and notwithstanding some of our concerns with the aspects of the GAO study, we acknowledge and are resolute in our commitment to remedy the deficiencies."
In responding to the report, the State Department agreed with all 18 of GAO's recommendations for resolving the problems, though it contested the idea that the department carelessly implemented business-class regulations without considering the increased cost.
"[T]here is no basis to conclude that the travel in question was not otherwise proper under existing criteria," stated a document provided to GAO by Sid Kaplan, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Resource Management and chief financial officer. "GAO did not find any instances of travel that was improperly conducted for other than official government purposes."