Flying Blind
The Department of Defense may know a lot about weapons systems, but apparently it is not comprised of financial wizards. Over a handful of years, the DOD has managed to spend an estimated $100 million and may have even spent as much as a quarter billion dollars of hard-earned taxpayer funds on airline tickets for its employees — airline tickets that nobody actually used.

“Imagine if you purchased a fully refundable airline ticket for $600 or $700 and didn’t use it. Would you just put it in your dresser drawer and forget about it?” asks Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa. “Of course not. That would be like dumping your money down the drain. Well, that’s just what the Department of Defense has done, except it has done it many times over, with millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money.”

When the Government Accountability Office took a closer look at the issue, it found that “the DOD was not aware of this problem before our audit and did not maintain data on unused tickets.” So the GAO actually had to ask the commercial airlines themselves (American, Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways) to provide what information they had on DOD tickets.

Using the data from the airlines, the GAO found that the DOD had not received refunds for at least 139,000 totally or partially unused tickets issued in fiscal years 2001 and 2002. That included, for example, an $8,100 business-class ticket from Atlanta, Georgia, to Muscat, Oman, as well as a $9,800 business-class ticket from Washington, D.C., to Canberra, Australia. By extrapolation, the GAO considered it a “conservative” estimate that at least $100 million in unclaimed refunds remained for tickets purchased from 1997 to 2003.

But the fleecing doesn’t stop there. A related GAO investigation revealed that the Defense Department travel system is rife with fraud. In one case, a high-ranking DOD official claimed a reimbursement of $9,700 for 13 airline tickets for which he never paid. He contended he didn’t notice that nearly $10,000 had been added to his bank account. A Navy seaman used DOD travel credit accounts over a six-month period to buy 70 tickets at a cost of $60,000, which he then used or resold at discounted rates to friends and family.

Unfortunately, at this point, tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money have been thrown away during a time of high deficits and a war on terrorism — when soldiers have died in Iraq for lack of adequate body and vehicle armor. “Every dollar wasted by the Pentagon is a dollar that could be spent on the war against terrorism,” says Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

Senator Grassley concurs: “It’s outrageous, and the fact that the Defense Department didn’t even know it was wasting this money is even worse than $100 million down a rat hole.”

Sheesh. After emptying our wallets for so many dubious projects, you’d think the U.S. government would at least say thank you.