It’s unclear whether the Labor Department met the goal of reducing agency conference costs by 20 percent over 2010-2013, the Labor IG has reported.
A report said the department has established adequate controls to comply with an OMB memo and an executive order on conference spending, which added several approval and reporting requirements in response to disclosures of wasteful conference spending.
However, the IG found that one of the six 2013 conferences whose cost exceeded $100,000 did not have prior approval from the deputy secretary as required, and that the department did not report as required on its website regarding five of those, nor to the IG on two of them. The department also failed to report 10 of 16 conferences costing between $20,000 and $100,000 to the IG as required.
It said that the department reported a reduction in conference costs of $85.5 million in 2013, claiming to have exceeded its reduction target of $61 million by $24.5 million. However, the department did not include the total 2010 costs for all the cost categories cited the executive order in its reduction target and “therefore, it could not ensure the reported amount accurately represented a 20 percent reduction in costs.”
The department generally agreed with recommendations to better report on conference spending except that it said it would not be cost effective to identify the 2010 totals for each category included in the executive order to determine whether the 20 percent goal was met.
