16 Dollar Muffins and Taxpayers Pick up the Tab
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
$16 Muffins, and Taxpayers Pick Up the Tab
By: Charlie Savage, New York Times
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Tuesday came under
criticism for "extravagant and potentially wasteful" spending on
conferences at the end of the Bush administration and early in the
Obama administration, including paying $16 per muffin and $8 per
eight-ounce cup of coffee at certain events.
"Some conferences featured costly meals, refreshments, and
themed breaks that we believe were indicative of wasteful or
extravagant spending - especially when service charges, taxes, and
indirect costs are factored into the actual price paid for food and
beverages," said a newly released report
by the department's acting inspector general, Cynthia Schnedar.
The report scrutinized spending at a sampling of conferences
from October 2007 to September 2009, focusing on eye-popping
calculations of food and beverage expenses. For example, at a
four-day conference in November 2007 at the Grand Hyatt in Denver
on the "Amber Alert" system for searching for missing children,
taxpayers ended up paying $5.57 for each of 1,334 cans of soda.
A five-day conference in August 2009 at the Capital Hilton in
Washington to train immigration lawyers saved money by serving only
snacks. But it still cost $4,200 for 250 muffins and $2,880 for 300
cookies and brownies, more than $16 a muffin and nearly $10 per
cookie and brownie.
The department said that it had brought such spending under
better control in the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years, which were
outside the scope of the audit.
Moreover, the department told auditors that some food costs were
exaggerated because of the way deals with the hotels were often
structured: the hotels provided "free" meeting space in exchange
for an agreement to use their pricey food and beverage
services.
Planners often did no cost-benefit analysis to determine whether
it would have been thriftier to pay for the meeting space directly
and obtain cheaper catering, the report said. But it noted that the
conferences often ended up spending tens of thousands more on food
and beverage than the minimum necessary to secure the "free"
meeting rooms.
Over all during the 2008-9 fiscal years, the department spent
$121 million to host or participate in 1,832 conferences. The
report focused on 10 of those conferences that cost $4.4 million,
and questioned $134,432 in spending.
The report also criticized as "unreasonable" certain travel by
planners. For example, a consultant in Anchorage was hired to help
put on a 2008 Indian Nations conference in California. The
consultant billed $3,454 to make the 2,400-mile trip three
times.
While the department largely agreed with the report's findings
and recommendations, it said it had been reasonable to hire the
Alaskan consultant, who had special expertise in a variety of
matters like Alaskan tribal culture and federal grant
procedures.
The inspector general previously criticized similar overspending
in a 2007 audit. Department supervisors in 2008 and 2009 issued
rules and memorandums to limit such costs. But the report found
that several conferences put on afterward had nevertheless exceeded
such limits.