In response to allegations of waste in travel spending levelled at the Department of Homeland Security by its own Inspector General, the DHS could be forced to create an ‘Office of Travel’ to handle and oversee all its travel and maintain records.

Janet Napolitano visits FEMA HQ

To look into the allegations made in the report, a congressional hearing was called by the House Subcommittee on Management, Investigations, and Oversight on Feb 4, 2010.

After the hearing titled “Furthering the Mission or Having Fun: Lax Travel Policies Cost DHS Millions,” the subcommittee’s chairman Rep. Chris Carney (PA-10) said in an interview that his committee could include accountability measures for travel spending along with its recommendations for the DHS budget.

Chairman Carney further specified that “Creating an office within DHS that handles all of DHS travel makes a lot of sense to me.” He believes that a centralized office to handle conferences and travel would make it easier to track the spending.

According to the IG report, Homeland Security spent $110m on conference-related activities from fiscal year 2005 to 2007. To be noted here that DHS has already changed its travel policies as of Oct 2008, and the report actually praises current DHS policies regarding spending on travel and conferences.

But there seems to be a problem with their records. The report says that the available conference spending data was “unreliable, unverifiable and provided little assurance that all conference and related costs were tracked and accounted for properly.”

The IG report offered 12 basic recommendations, one of which was for looking into the implementation of a conference management information system to facilitate tracking and monitoring of costs, achievements, attendance, etc.

Goes without saying that funding for a new Office for Travel will add to the department’s annual travel-related spending. The DHS already has over 230,000 employees with an FY 2011 budget of $56.3 billion with 16 departments, 6 advisory panels and 8 Offices that were born out of the 22 agencies brought together under Homeland Security in 2002.