VA Purchase Cards: Not Exactly Scandalous

Last night, the Associated Press moved a story over the wires that went out with this headline: "AP Impact: VA Workers Charge $2.6B on Gov't Credit Cards at Luxury Hotels, High-End Retailers."

That's a grabber, huh? And given the fact that we at Government Executive have reported on these kinds of abuses at various agencies in the past, it didn't come as that much of a surprise.

But it turns out there's quite a bit less here than meets the eye. First of all, the $2.6 billion figure refers to the total amount of spending by Veterans Affairs employees using federal purchase cards. And a detailed list of purchases obtained by the AP "reveals few outward signs of questionable spending, with hundreds of purchases at prosthetic, orthopedic and other medical supply stores," the story acknowledges.

Even the stuff the AP characterizes as questionable seems fairly routine -- and doesn't add up to a lot of dollars. It includes purchases totaling $8,471 at Sharper Image, a high-tech electronics specialty store, and less than $2,000 worth of spending at Franklin Covey, purveyor of high-end planners for executives. Those purchases could be perfectly legitimate, and they're certainly not on the order of using a government card to buy photos of Elvis or get DirecTV service.

The AP report also noted that "employees based at VA headquarters made credit card charges at Las Vegas casino hotels totaling $26,198." But the agency is building a VA hospital in the city and -- for better or for worse -- a lot of conferences and events are held there. So $26,000 doesn't seem like an outlandish amount of total spending in Vegas. And the details included in the piece on how the money was spent could be misleading. "One VA headquarters employee appears to have passed up casino hotels by booking at a Holiday Inn Express in Las Vegas for $787.75," the AP notes. But virtually all federal travelers stay at government rates under federal per diem policies, so who's to say if the Holiday Inn Express actually was cheaper?

On the whole, I'm with the folks over at the OhMyGov site on this one: The facts don't appear to support the tone of the article, and the righteous indignation drummed up by the usual-suspects list of members of Congress and heads of watchdog groups quoted in the story isn't terribly convincing.