With Travel Expenses, Some in Congress Keep the Change

[babylonsister]

I think this sucks; a low-level federal employee has to account for every nickel and dime they spend, why not Congress? :grr:

http://www.propublica.org/article/with-travel-expenses-some-in-congress-keep-the-change-302

With Travel Expenses, Some in Congress Keep the Change
by Sebastian Jones, ProPublica - March 2, 2010 12:16 pm EST


Congressmen like to travel -- in the past two years alone, members of the House and the Senate ran up 5,300 travel days, according to the Wall Street Journal -- and when they're abroad on official business, they get a chunk of spending money each day to cover basic costs. In Paris, for example, it's $178, in Tokyo it's $214, and in Kabul it's $28. When the trip ends, any unspent funds are supposed to be returned to the taxpayer, but as the Journal reports <1> today, this doesn't always happen.

Instead, "lawmakers use the excess cash for shopping or to defray spouses' travel expenses," the Journal writes. "Sometimes they give it away; sometimes they pocket it. Many lawmakers said they didn't know the rules demand repayment."

Because there is no internal system of tracking these payments, it's unclear how much money has been disbursed, what it has been spent on and how much ought to have been returned. The Journal estimated that $375,000 to $625,000 had been given to House members in the past two years alone.

For their part, members of Congress from both political parties expressed little concern over the practice of not returning the cash. "You are all concerned about nickels and dimes, and I'm not," Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, told the Journal, while former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, characterized the practice of using excess funds for shopping as "fairly standard."

[ThomWV]

1. While I don't particularly condone it, I don't think its economically enforceable

If "the Journal" estimated the cost to be less than a million it is hard to imagine that any enforcement scheme could be less expensive or in fact that even proper accounting for the money would cost more than the expense itself. I hate to say it, but at some level you have to just let it go. If a Representative visits Kabul and only spends $27 I don't want him or her or his or her staff to spend a minute of their expensive time accounting for that one dollar. Its just not worth it. And it wouldn't be much different if that same Rep was in Paris and only spent fifty bucks in a day, its still not worth it to chase down the other hundred and a quarter. And besides that, the very next day they may incur legitimate expenses twice the reimbursement rate and not get but half their money back. So in the end I suspect it all evens out. I know when I traveled at Government expense it always, and I mean always, cost me money out of pocket no matter what the rate was for food/lodging and incidentals for the region or city.

[FarCenter]

2. If they pocket it without declaring it as income, it is tax evasion

String them up.

[TheMadMonk]

3. And your point is? $1/2 million over two years is pocket change.

The bog roll budget for congress is probably higher.

Yes the money should in theory be returned. However it's so little that the cost of administering and auditing would almost certainly be more than would ever be saved. In fact I would not be at all surprised to learn that it's issued in cash simply to avoid having to pay someone to decide whether or not a second croisant with the morning latte is a legitimate expense on the congressional credit card.

This isn't an outrage, it's a bloody pointless distraction.

The Pentagon can't or refuses to account for some 25% of it's anual budget ($175 billion or so in this year's). There's a good place to start.

You DO NOT make significant savings by paring back on the smallest ticket items in a budget. A concept that those who believe NASA's money should be spent down here on Earthly matters rather than pie in the sky seem to find impossible to grasp.

[babylonsister]

5. My point is, they should be just as accountable for their per diems

as the federal peons are, and they're not. I recognize it's chump change, doesn't change my opinion.

[TheMadMonk]

6. And mine is that the cost of such accountability is more than the amount...

...involved, even if each and every member were scrupulously honest.

It's an amount deliberately set aside for petty incidentals, for the specific purpose of not having to pay the price of doing the bookkeeping for those incidentals.

As for your federal peons, I strongly suspect that when they're traveling on the taxpayers dime, considerable savings could be made simply by allocating a fixed per diem ammount for expenses to them too and NOT wasting money on ensuring that only "allowable expenses" are covered.

You can't just "figure it out" and adjust people's wages accordingly, then require them to cover expenses with their own money for the simple reason, that doing it that way, makes it THEIR money and the vast majority of people will be buggered (not litterally, Aussie coloquialism) before they spend their own money on work expenses. Instead they are allocated a certain amount that will cover such expenses, and if with a little creativeness they are able to spend a bit less and pocket the difference, then good luck to them. Yes the rules say they should return any leftovers, the rules have to say that to mollify folks like yourself, but it is fully understood that virtually no one will.

And further understood (by me at least) that the only time that anyone actually loses out, is when some anal idiot thinks it's a good use of $10 million, to track down where $1/2 million in dimes went.

[Submariner]

4. When I expense a business trip I have to account for EVERY PENNY

that will be billed to the client. And I have to provide receipts.

I would like to know what makes these dipsticks so special that they feel they are not accountable. Thieving pieces of sh!t.