USAF Says "Charge (It)!"

The General Accounting Office says that the United States Air Force is every bit as profligate with its credit cards as is the Army and Navy.

Reports the AP:

"Air Force plastic was used for cruises, gambling, adult clubs, Dallas Cowboys football games, a down payment on a sapphire ring and a general's Las Vegas casino party.

And for a mounted deer head at the Air Force Academy. Officials there said the $375 charge for taxidermy services allowed the roadkill victim to be used in educational programs."

Anything for our boys and girls in uniform. Read the full GAO tally of your tax dollars at work.

Comments

[Russ Lemley]

So this means that government agencies will be subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, right? No? Oh, didn't think so.

[scott]

wrong dan...the GAO is only called in to investigate AFTER fraud is discovered. There is essentially very little oversight of the actual accounting of our money.
Also when you take a stay at home welfare mom and make her work, she has to pay for daycare, which she then gets via a government subsidy. She makes six dollars an hour, taking her off the welfare rolls, but it costs the taxpayer 8 dollars an hour to keep in employed in her six dollar an hour job. Real welfare reform involves extensive retraining and education, which takes years and may not be possible, as not everyone is intelligent enough to be retrained or educated. Putting people in meaningless, make-work jobs so they don't show up on the "welfare rolls" just hides the problem. My point is I'd rather see a kid fed, regardless of how much a loser his or her mother is, then fund another congressional junket to the neighborhood nudie bar.

[scott]

one more thing-
"The function of a government is to provide for the people that which they cannot provide for themselves." -Abraham Lincoln

[scott]

so what would save us more money, so-called welfare reform or a little oversight of our government spending? I am guessing that if all the fraud and accounting errors in the federal government were found and fixed, we could all get a nice check from the government, and still eleiminate the deficit.

[Dan]

so what would save us more money, so-called welfare reform or a little oversight of our government spending?

Welfare reform -- it's pretty obvious, if you think about it. Or do you think that the people in charge of that "little government oversight" will be working for free?

You're also obviously forgetting that there's already more than a "little" government oversight of spending. And it doesn't work all that well, now does it? 🙂

[alkali]

Individual employees are often personally responsible for corporate credit cards and for that reason use them as their own. In such cases, the major advantage of having the card is that it identifies you as a representative of the company and gets you better hotel room rates, etc.

All of which is to say that if this stuff was being charged back to the federal government, it's an outrage. If the card was just being used in lieu of a personal credit card, there's no outrage.

[Casey Tompkins]

Well, scott, if you took a moment to actually read the GAO document in question you would have very quickly found out on page 37 that the listing of "Potentially Fraudlent Air Force Purchase Card Transactions" totalled less than $50,000.

And I can say from reading other coverage of armed forces abuse of credit cards the likely range of "fraud" is well under the $100 million mark.

I would suggest that you pack your fantasies at the door and start collecting real numbers for mature, intelligent analysis.