Pentagon Spouses May Want to Check Work Credit Cards

Audit turns up $1M in charges to casinos, escorts
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted May 7, 2015 2:07 PM CDT
Pentagon Spouses May Want to Check Work Credit Cards
The Las Vegas Strip.   (AP Photo/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus)

An audit of government credit cards issued to Pentagon employees turned up a strange thing: lots of charges for gambling, prostitutes, and strip clubs, reports Politico. Specifically, the audit found more than $1 million in such charges from July 2013 to July 2014, with the bulk of that total, $952,258, going to casinos, reports ABC News. The way the cards work, employees pay the credit card bill and put in for expenses after the fact by submitting receipts, so taxpayers weren't necessarily being billed for the expenses. Instead, the employees probably used their work cards mainly to hide the expenses from spouses, a Pentagon official tells Politico.

"Clearly, the behavior displayed by these individuals neither comports with our values nor represents the good service of the vast majority of [our] service members or DOD civilians,” says another defense official to ABC. It's not clear whether anyone's losing his job, but about 400 employees were receiving some kind of disciplinary action. In other federal-worker news, nearly 1,600 IRS employees have been busted for either failing to pay taxes or cheating on their returns over the last decade, reports AP. Most got reprimands or suspensions, but kept their jobs enforcing tax rules on everyone else. (More Pentagon stories.)

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