 But he got caught using those cards to fill up his personal SUV. What tripped
him up?
One of the cards that paid for gasoline was assigned to an all-electric vehicle.
Oops.
“Yes, that was an obvious sign,” Eric Radwick, special agent for the General
Services Administration, deadpanned in an interview with Watchdog.org.
In April, Harris agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Virginia for
theft of government property — two years of supervised probation, nine days of
confinement and a $5,000 fine and restitution for the $5,354 he acknowledged
stealing by using the gas cards.
Harris’ case may be noteworthy for his blunder, but, unfortunately, it’s hardly
unusual.
The Office of the Inspector General at GSA has closed out 260 fleet card cases
and recovered more than $2.4 million in federal taxpayer money between 2010 and
2014, but specialists in how to crack down on fraud say the real figure is
probably much higher.
“It’s difficult to prove,” Allan Bachman, education manager at the Association
of Certified Fraud Examiners, told Watchdog.org. “Unless you look at every
little charge and do mileage estimates on every vehicle and how many miles per
gallon they get and how many miles per gallon were actually expended, then
you’re in deep weeds.”
“I don’t think we can put a definitive number on how bad the problem is,” said
Radwick, a member of the Inspector General’s team for 13 years, who said he’s
seen the number of fuel fraud cases increase dramatically during that time.
A review of GSA cases by Watchdog.org of government employees accused of
misusing fleet cards showed 10 guilty pleas, one military discharge and one
arrest in just the past 11 months.
The thefts were as low as $976 and as high as $24,000, involving a range of
federal employees that included a VA hospital volunteer, a U.S. Navy recruiter,
an Amtrak employee, a contract driver for the Department of Homeland Security
and a former inspector with District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Services.
But one fuel fraud case GSA uncovered in 2011 was more than 10 times bigger.
That’s when a then-married couple had to pay restitution of nearly $300,000 for
using multiple fleet credit cards to fill up non-government vehicles in Hampton,
Virginia.
The cards were assigned to Colleen White, who worked at the motor pool at Fort
Monroe military installation before it was decommissioned. Lanaire White was
sentenced to 84 months of incarceration and three years of supervised release
after being convicted in a jury trial of conspiracy, wire fraud, theft and
firearms violations.
“Everyone’s got one or two gas card cases in their portfolio,” said Radwick of
his IG staff of about 65 agents, including 10 in the Washington, D.C., office.
“It’s very steady.”
But it can be hard to crack down on fuel fraud because of the sheer number of
cards the federal government has distributed — some 590,000.
“The more cards that are out there, the more opportunities there are to take
advantage of those cards,” Bachman said in a phone interview from the ACFE
headquarters in Austin, Texas.
The government fleet is huge — more than 650,000 vehicles around the world,
driving more than 5 billion miles a year, consuming $400 million in gas and
costing $4 billion to maintain. The fleet includes some military vehicles that
are leased through the GSA.
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 “Just by the number of government employees
and the vast mission of the federal government, there’s going to be
large amounts of everything — computers, cars, what have you,”
Radwick said. “With the design of the program, hopefully agencies
aren’t paying for cars they don’t need because it’s coming out of an
agency’s line-item budget … I know the vehicles that we have, we use
’em all.”
Bachman, who believes the problem is not worse in the federal
government than in the private sector, said most companies and
agencies use gas card systems because they’re just easier.
“If the purchasing department had to be responsible for handing
out cash every time somebody had to get gas, or even taking the
vehicle themselves to fill it up or to keep a fuel farm as many
places do, that becomes really burdensome,” Bachman said. “It’s much
cheaper just to say, ‘Here’s your credit card for gas, it has a
limit, say, of $75 a transaction and you can’t use more than four
times a month.’ If those kinds of controls are built it, it’s a
tremendous advantage.”
The key is to make sure controls are put in place and enforced.
“We’re looking at a lot of data,” Bachman said. “The best thing you
can do is sampling — not necessarily watching every transaction, but
picking transactions and saying, do these transactions really make
sense?”
Radwick has heard a slew of excuses from federal employees who
misuse government-issued gas cards. One of the most common? That
they simply mistook the government card for their personal credit
card.
But GSA recently changed the gas cards to make them more distinctive
on the front and back:
“Once you put (the card) in the pump it requires you to do stuff
that normal credit cards don’t, so that excuse goes out the window,”
Radwick said.
“People are creatures of habit,” Bachman said. “An employee who is
using the card legitimately, you can pretty much track when that
person is going to use their fuel card. So when they use the card
outside of that pattern, that raises a potential red flag.”
Online tools and data mining help GSA inspectors track down more
cheaters and the agency has made a concerted effort to publicize
convictions and guilty pleas.
“When you do catch someone, if you make it very public that you’ve
caught someone abusing the procurement card, that they have been
dismissed and, depending on the magnitude, possibly even looking
into civil or criminal prosecution, that sends a message as well,”
Bachman said. “That’s a big deterrent.”
So why do people do it?
“They don’t think they’re going to get caught,” Radwick said. “And a
lot of times when they do get caught it’s ‘Yeah, I knew this was
coming’ … We very rarely catch someone on their first, second or
third time doing it. They’ve been doing it for a little while and
they’ve gotten complacent and they think, nobody’s watching this,
nobody’s paying attention.”
Radwick said he expected the drop in gasoline prices in the past 10
months would encourage cheaters to back off. But despite the risk,
that hasn’t happened.
Despite more arrests, more convictions and more efficient technology
in the hands of GSA agents, the problem persists.
“Are we getting more cases? Yes we are,” Radwick said. “Is that
because it’s getting worse or are we getting better? I really don’t
know.”
“It’s hard to tell if we’re chipping away at it and making real
inroads or not,” Bachman said.
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