State's Centrally Billed Foreign Affairs Travel: Internal Control Breakdowns and Ineffective Oversight Lost Taxpayers Tens of Millions of Dollars

Abstract

Breakdowns in key internal controls, a weak control environment, and ineffective oversight of States centrally billed travel accounts resulted in taxpayers paying tens of millions of dollars for unauthorized and improper premium-class travel and unused airline tickets. States over 260 centrally billed accounts are used by State and other foreign affairs agencies to purchase transportation services, such as airline and train tickets. GAO found that between April 2003 and September 2004 States centrally billed accounts were used to purchase over 32,000 premium-class tickets costing almost $140 million. Premium-class travel primarily business-class airline tickets represented about 19 percent of the tickets issued but about 49percent of the $286 million spent on airline tickets with States centrally billed account travel cards. GAO determined that this trend continued for fiscal year 2005

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2006
Accession Number
AD1179411

Entities

People

  • Gregory Kutz

Organizations

  • United States Government Accountability Office

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accountability
  • Business Administration
  • Classified Materials
  • Commerce
  • Congress
  • Data Mining
  • Department Of State
  • Domestic
  • Europe
  • Executives
  • Financial Management
  • Government Employees
  • Governments
  • Homeland Security
  • Law
  • Management Personnel
  • National Governments
  • Personnel Management
  • Regulations
  • Resource Management
  • Security
  • Statistical Samples
  • Statistical Sampling
  • Transport Aircraft
  • United States
  • United States Government

Fields of Study

  • Business

Readers

  • Government Contracting/Procurement.