Federal Manager's Daily Report

GSA, the agency that issues charge cards for federal employees government-wide to use on official travel, needs to tighten management of spending by its own employees on the cards, and IG report has said.

GSA’s travel card policy office within its office of administrative services (OAS) is “not ensuring that supervisors for GSA’s travel cardholders receive questionable charges reports in a timely manner. This severely limits supervisors’ and OAS’ ability to detect and address travel card misuse and abuse,” the IG said. For example, it found that one GSA cardholder used the card improperly 58 times over a five-month period, which continued because the supervisor did not receive the questionable charge reports on time.

“Further, we found that OAS regional coordinators continue to not follow up on questionable charges when they do not receive a response from a cardholder’s supervisor,” the IG said, pointing out that it had raised the same issue in a similar review a year ago.

Such shortcomings “increase the risk of illegal, improper, and erroneous charges within GSA’s travel card program,” on which spending increased by $400,000 to $10.1 million over 2016-2017.

The report said that GSA management agreed with recommendations including to specify a timeframe for the travel card policy office to send its reports of questionable spending to the OAS regional coordinators and to ensure that they in turn follow up on questionable charges.