Fallout continues to occur in the wake of a
report by the General Services Administration's (GSA) Inspector General (IG) exposing "excessive" spending at a 2010 meeting of government employees in Las Vegas. In its reaction this week, however, the meetings industry is urging lawmakers and citizens to avoid a rush to judgment.
"The findings of the IG report clearly detail instances of inappropriate spending and poor decision making on the part of federal employees," said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow. "At a time when Washington is laser-focused on creating jobs and curbing wasteful spending, we hope policymakers will remember that responsible travel can help accomplish these goals. We know through repeated studies that travel for face-to-face meetings increases worker productivity in the private and public sectors. We also know that meetings, conferences and events are critical to our economy and support 845,000 U.S. jobs. We hope Congress and the Administration will consider these facts when deciding how to appropriately respond to the event from October 2010."
When properly followed, U.S. Travel pointed out, federal travel rules and regulations enforce competitive bidding; cost limitations on food, beverages and lodging; and a host of other restrictions that ensure limited spending while allowing productive government business to take place.
Continued Dow, "The American people demand two things of their government: to be responsible stewards of their hard-earned tax dollars and to provide valuable services that benefit this country. Federal travel, when conducted responsibly, fulfills both of those promises. Unfortunately, a single instance of irresponsible decision making has the potential to cast a negative light on the millions of men and women who work every day to make America's meetings, conventions and events industry the best in the world. It is important to remember that this particular event was the result of a failure to follow federal travel regulations that were already in place to protect the misuse of taxpayer funds."
Kent Allaway, chairman of the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), made a similar argument, but with a decidedly different tone: In a post on PCMA's blog Tuesday, he admitted that meetings are expensive, but urged the government to focus less on cost and more on value.
"Anyone who has spent time on the hotel side of our community understands the expense needed just to open the doors of a ballroom, much less set it to a client's individual needs," he wrote. "Let's not get hung up on F&B pricing, but instead try to look at the value of what attendees receive at a face-to-face meeting … Our community represents and directly supports 1.7 million jobs, $263 billion in spending, a $106 billion contribution to GDP, $60 billion in labor revenue, $14.3 billion in federal tax revenue and $11.3 billion in state and local tax revenue … How much taxpayer money was spent on this investigation into a meeting that took place in 2010? It only took me two minutes to pull up the current catering menus online and see that the pricing today is exactly as described in the article. Perhaps some poor choices may have been made by the GSA, but we cannot be short-sighted and allow these highly inflamed and publicized incidents to frame the intrinsic value of meeting face to face and the contributions meetings make to drive all of our businesses forward."