Three Department of Energy sites reviewed by the department’s inspector general spent over $1.6 million in fiscal 2012 on stipend reimbursements to employees for use of personal mobile devices without effective checks in place to determine whether they actually incurred additional costs. In some cases for example employees might be reimbursed for the costs of data with their providers when they already have unlimited data on their devices.
As BYOD – or bring your own device – becomes common practice whereby employees use, for example, personal smartphones for work communications, agencies are grappling with a range of information security issues but also trying to figure out who should pay for what. Managers need to strike a balance between fair reimbursement and not unnecessarily burning through a limited IT budget.
At DoE, officials at the sites evaluated approved stipends ranging from $15 to $110 per month without reviewing existing plans. The IG raised the issue of whether employees could claim stipends even without incurring additional charges and recommended that basic controls be put in place – including periodic evaluations of a sample of stipend users to validate whether allowances being claimed are valid.
