A-Fuggin-Men
I do have a suggestion. Oh how I wish they would really audit organizations in the air force/marines/army/navy. It really irritates me coming from an organization that had such a huge budget they had to "blow" money on various things like blackberry's and pda's and lcd monitors just to keep their uber budget. Now I am in a directorate that is basically broke and can't afford to piss in one hand. I feel a "lean event" would help free up/disperse money to other orgs.
The problem is there is still the mind set (that is slowly changing) but still exists, that if you don’t use it, you lose it.
So where people see what they speculate as waste is "often" panic spending. Usually seen at the end of a budgetary quarter or end of the fiscal year
every command receives a yearly budget, when the money is gone.. it is gone.
if your command did not use all of the money, the chances are your next years budget will be less. Every years budget is "somewhat" based on previous years expenditures.
Let's use my command for a quick example.
Do to certain circumstances which I will not mention, our command as a whole will be traveling probably about 50% less this year than we did last year, and we will probably be back to our normal tempo next year.
So we have this huge amount of extra TAD budget this year that we will not need.
But if we don’t spend it, then next year the powers that be will look at our command and figure that we only spent X amount, so we only need X amount - amount Y leaving us with a new lower amount X next year.
But next year we will be back to tempo and if we have less than we normally get we will not be able to accomplish our mission.
So that is why some times you have panic spending. You might have a year where everything just works, all the stars align and you don’t need as much money, but it is an oditity and you know it and you know that next year the chances are everything will go to crap, and if you have a smaller budget you will be screwed.
As I said, the mind set is changing, the stigma is still there and to some extent still valid, but more commanders are just sucking it up and giving money back at the end of the year vice doing the panic spending. Usually unless there are major events, commands are just working with the smaller budgets and accepting the fact they can get by on less money.
And trust me, the auditing is getting better. I cant purchase anything over $2000.00 with out specific approval.
And I can no longer purchase even one computer unless I make a special request that goes to Echelon I level.
And as far as these news reports of people using government credit cards and abusing them, just another example of our great “MIS-INFORMATION†news media at work.
I have a government credit card, and I can tell you that it is monitored really close, and they have it coded that I can only use it at specific places.
You can find crap on just about anything, and I am sure there are people that have found loop holes and ways around things, but the news media latches on to it and does stories making people think it is a common occurrence.
