Congressional hearings on the scandal over spending at a Government Services Administration conference in Las Vegas beginning Today show all the signs of turning into an election-year political brawl.
Earlier this month, the head of the GSA fired several deputies and resigned after a report by the agency’s inspector general accused it of hosting an “excessive and wasteful” conference in October 2010 at a Las Vegas resort.
House Oversight & Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) announced that that a hearing “Addressing GSA’s Culture of Wasteful Spending,” will be held today at 1:30 pm EST, and broadcast live on C-SPAN3. That jumped the gun on a hearing already planned for Thursday, April 19 by a different House committee. That is still scheduled, as are two others by U.S. Senate committees.
Press releases issued last week by Issa’s committee make clear what the tone of the hearing will be. One was titled “Exposed: Obama Administration Fibbing About GSA Convention Spending Before They Took Office,” and the next, “E-mail Shreds Claim that Obama Administration’s April Maneuvers Were a Quick Response to Facts of Scandal.”
Calls by Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association urging federal lawmakers “to carry out a measured and appropriate response to the findings of the report,” seem likely to go unheeded.
Not that Dow was defending the actual conference. In his statement, Dow noted that the inspector general’s findings “clearly detail instances of inappropriate spending and poor decision making on the part of federal employees.”
While the impact on the meetings industry remains to be seen, the impact on GSA meetings is already clear. Shortly before resigning, former GSA Administrator Martha Johnson noted in an official response to the inspector general’s report that she not only agreed with all its conclusions, she was cancelling all future Western Region Conferences and had cut the fiscal year 2013 travel budget of the four regions that attended.
In an April 9 column, the Washington Post’s Joe Davidson predicted that the fallout will hit the rest of the government’s meetings. The headline: “All feds pay the price for GSA scandal.”
What to Expect
While the basic complaint in the inspector general’s report was about excessive spending at the 300-person GSA Public Buildings Service’s annual Western Regions Conference at the M Resort Spa Casino in Las Vegas, which cost $822,751, it also criticized agency executives and planners for a number of federal procurement law and rules violations, among them allegedly agreeing to an increased food and beverage budget in exchange for room rates that met federal lodging cost limits.
Some issue to look for in the hearings include:
Room rates and F&B. One of the ways the report says the GSA failed to follow contracting regulations was by “Promising the hotel an additional $41,480 in catering charges in exchange for the ‘concession’ of the hotel honoring the government’s lodging cost limit,” and reducing the room rate previously agreed to in the contract.
Corporate social responsibility. The inspector general’s report also called out the event for spending $75,000 on a team-building exercise that involved assembling bicycles later donated to an area charity—an expenditure featured prominently in the New York Times’ coverage of the resignation on Tuesday. This is a fairly common corporate social responsibility event, which has been seen as a way for private companies to put a positive face on their meetings.
Contracting and A/V. Another criticism in the report that gained mainstream press traction is the allegation that the event’s $58,808 A/V contract did not go to a small business, as required by federal regulation, and that GSA personnel gave the company they wanted to use details of a competing bid, enabling it to win the contract.
Incentives and employee recognition. In the wake of the GSA meeting scandal, Fox News reported that the GSA spent $250,000 on a points-based employee recognition program called Hats Off, describing it as “a workplace incentive initiative where administration employees could garner ‘points’ for good work around the office.”