Several cases resulted in employees receiving written or oral counseling or cautionary statements. Image: Ekkamai Chaikanta/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffAn inspector general audit has found few instances of misuse of charge cards by IRS employees but those instances involved familiar issues of split purchases and purchases for unauthorized uses.
Auditors found that misuses of the cards were “minimal and generally for nominal amounts” in the six months ending in March–nine violations totaling about $58,000 plus 10 purchases totaling about $4,000 that did not comply with IRS policies but were not reportable as violations. In that time, some 2,100 purchase card holders made about 16,000 purchases totaling more than $8.5 million.
However, almost all the $58,000 total was due to five instances of split purchases—dividing a transaction into several smaller ones to keep the amount spent under each below a reporting threshold that would apply if it were one transaction.
The remainder went toward unspecified prohibited purchases, including several deemed as for personal use.
Several of the cases resulted in employees receiving written or oral counseling or cautionary statements, while in several others nothing was done, it said. While the IRS penalty guide provides for penalties from a five-day suspension for a first offense up to removal for a third offense, use of the penalty guide is not mandatory, it said.
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