Originally posted by Jason Miller on Federal News Radio
Another senior official at the Veterans Affairs Department is out because of the conference spending scandal.
Alice Muellerweiss, the dean of VA's Learning University, resigned today.
"VA has taken administrative action against two career senior executives named in the OIG report," a VA spokeswoman said in a statement. "One employee has subsequently resigned. The other employee has been reassigned to other duties."
Originally posted by Charles S. Clark on GovExec
The Energy Department should strengthen monitoring of its contractors' foreign travel, which in the past six years has cost more than $300 million for 90,000 trips, according to a recent management alert the department's inspector general issued.
IG Gregory Friedman noted about 85 percent of Energy's travel costs were incurred by contractors on projects such as inspecting nuclear weapons and visiting Japan in the aftermath of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear power disaster.
Originally posted by Kedar Pavgi on GovExec
More than 60 percent of conference spending that Commerce Department bureaus reported in the first quarter of fiscal 2012 was not based on actual costs incurred, according to a new report from Commerce's inspector general.
In an analysis of the department's spending on 24 conferences, the IG's report found that $772,282 of the total $1.7 million in reported spending was based on estimates. Auditors labeled another $282,637 of the total as unsupported costs.
Originally posted by Charles S. Clark on Government Executive
Among the many lapses the Veterans Affairs Department may have committed in planning two lavish training conferences in Orlando, Fla., in 2011 was a failure to adhere to contracting procedures.
The inspector general's report on the $6.1 million pair of employee gatherings, which led to the resignation of the department's Chief Human Capital Officer John Sepulveda, focused mostly on overspending, wrongful acceptance of gifts by employees and unnecessary advance trips to plan the conferences.
Following a new inspector general's audit of two conferences held in 2011, the Veterans Affairs Department has enacted numerous tactics to check spending, root out misconduct by employees and keep senior officials involved in conference planning.
One key control is a new requirement that a senior executive must approve all proposed conferences or training sessions, the department said in a statement Oct. 1.
The undersecretary, assistant secretary or similarly-ranked VA official has to give approval for a conference proposal with project costs reaching to $100,000. If the expected costs exceed $100,000, the deputy secretary and the chief of staff must approve. Conferences with a bill expected to exceed $500,000 are generally prohibited, unless the VA secretary gives a waiver. As an additional check, officials must do an "After Action Review" following the conference to compare proposed costs to actual costs.
