Ah – the good life! The simple pleasures we all enjoy on vacation and travel – extend to our DHS employees as well apparently – they have been busted more and more using offline reservation systems extensively to book travel and airline reservations – despite the fact that it cost taxpayers more money.
Buried within the hundreds of pages of a 2014 Senate Appropriations Bill for the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) is mention of “excessive costs” associated with travel of DHS personnel around the country.
Apparently DHS personnel are booking flights using offline reservations, even though its much cheaper to use online booking.
The reasons why DHS personnel are using offline methods are unclear but seem to deal with employees getting “rewards” and mileage and otherwise gaming the system for their own personal advantage – at considerable cost to taxpayers.
The report notes the lack of responsible stewardship among DHS personnel and supervisors in this case and is trying to reduce the number of offline reservations in 2014 – without giving clear guidelines on how to expects to accomplish this goal.
The report says:
“The Committee is concerned with the excessive costs being incurred by Departmental entities with regard to travel reservations. While the Department’s policy requires the use of online booking systems in all cases, with few exceptions, cost data received by the Committee indicates that travel reservations are heavily skewed towards offline reservations. In fiscal year 2012, the Department spent $5,306,524 on travel reservations, of which $4,446,329 were from reservations made offline.
Making reservations through online booking can save millions of dollars as compared to offline booking, specifically 73 percent less for a domestic airline ticket and 75 percent for an international airline ticket.
The Department must continue to emphasize frugality by cutting costs and streamlining processes wherever possible. Therefore, the Department is expected to significantly reduce the number of offline reservations in fiscal year 2014. Further, the Committee directs the Inspector General to examine these travel costs to identify excessive expenditures and identify areas of savings” (source: Senate Appropriations bill 2014 Department of Homeland Security).
We contacted DHS on this issue and officials chose not to respond to our queries regarding its employees and contractors excessive use of offline reservations systems when booking flights and travel arraignments around the country and around the world.
Apparently, it would seem , that this is none of our business?