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Article: Federal workers' credit-card abuse hard to detect; Official plastic: At least 15 agencies have more credit cards than they do employees
- Article from:
- Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque)
- Article date:
- August 15, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2001 Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque). Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Government employees are on target to spend
nearly $19 billion using official credit cards this year - a plastic
shopping spree that was designed to make purchasing easier but often
has been slow to detect abuse.
For instance, an employee in the U.S. attorney's office in Los
Angeles charged nearly a half-million dollars in personal expenses
over three years to her government card before she was caught, court
records show.
Education Department workers misused their cards several times to
buy pornographic materials from an Internet site. Their purchases
raised no alarms at the agency but were detected by congressional
auditors.
In 2001 alone, the five banks that provide ...