Looks like the IRS may be in need of some swamp-draining by President-elect Donald Trump.
Americans picked up the tab for Internal Revenue Service employees who racked up more than $1.4 million in travel expenses in 2015, according to a Senate report.
Those expenses were created by just 27 employees using high-end car services and staying at luxury apartments and hotels, the Senate Finance Committee report found.
The committee reported that the “IRS has not routinely taken the steps allowable to reduce its travel related per diem expenditures,” citing examples of employees living in hotels for months at a time in the Washington, D.C. area without looking for lower-cost alternatives.
Despite the agency’s own policies, the committee found that some IRS “executives are still not geographically located where their primary job duties are,” incurring more unnecessary travel related expenses.
With an accompanying chart, the report listed “27 employees who traveled 125 business days or more at a total cost of over $1.4 million. The average cost of each trip was approximately $52,800 with an average trip length of 207 days.”
“The number of employees who travel more than half of the year and the cost at which they do so is simply unacceptable,” the report said.
And while the IRS guidelines allow employees to spend up to $7,099 per month on lodging, the committee saw “virtually no circumstance” in which that much would need to be spent monthly.
The report cited one employee who spent 168 days at the Grand Hyatt in Washington at a total cost to taxpayers of $38,799.
EXCLUSIVE: FBI New York field office ordered to ‘go forward’ on Clinton Foundation probe
“Another employee moved among several hotels in the Washington area before primarily residing at the Ritz Carlton – Pentagon City in Virginia. The employee’s hotel bills for the fiscal year totaled $72,544, $43,726 of which was for the Ritz Carlton – Pentagon City,” the report stated.
One employee “rented a four-bedroom, $1.07 million townhouse in Arlington, Va. for a year, costing $4,950 per month. Another stayed in a luxury apartment building costing $4,605 a month in downtown Chicago overlooking the Chicago River.
The committee also found additional expenses that were deemed “excessive or prohibited” such as charging the IRS for cab rides to dinner and the grocery store. The report listed showed a chart of “unusually high amounts of dry cleaning and laundry expenses.”
The Committee Chair Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, in a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, said the “lack of effort” by IRS employees to be prudent with taxpayer money was “concerning” and the report’s findings were “frustrating.”
“Committee staff saw example after example of routine Amtrak Acela trips, black car service, and luxury apartment rentals when reviewing IRS employee travel vouchers,” Hatch said. “Furthermore, the IRS made woefully insufficient efforts to reduce expenses in ways that would still allow employees to travel comfortably.”
Wake up right! Receive our free morning news blast HERE
DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW
Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!
[email protected]
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
- Troops DEPLOYED on U.S. soil – Democrat governor goes off the rails! - September 4, 2023
- $800 Million GONE – Government deal goes completely wrong! - August 30, 2023
- Doocy presses White House spox on Biden health czar’s proposed two beer limit - August 29, 2023
Comment
We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.
