Lawmakers exceed office allowances
By Jock Friedly
The Hill News
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Leading the budget-busters is Barbara-Rose Collins, the former Democratic lawmaker from Detroit who voters turned out of office in 1996 under an ethics cloud. She now owes taxpayers $29,700, a bill she said she plans to pay when she finds the money. At the bottom of the list is Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), who paid $96 from his own pocket to settle his modest overspending.
The top spenders are almost all Democrats, including Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, who paid $704 in September to remedy his excessive spending. One current Republican member — the fiscally conservative Rep. Tom Campbell (Calif.), who spent more than $10,000 too much on franked mail — and one former Republican member — Rep. Gary Franks (Conn.), who paid $544 for the mistake — also made the list.
The audit underscores the extraordinary difficulty in tracking how much members spend.
For years, the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) compiled the most authoritative figures on each House office's spending from the quarterly reports published by the House chief administrative officer.
But the NTU was not aware that many annual expenses are not reconciled for months, or even years, after the year closes. As a result, the NTU rarely revealed spending-cap violators, and printed budget figures were wrong by as much as 15 percent or more.
Adjustments to the yearly figures are buried in the massive quarterly reports for the following year. The Hill's own review of the 9,000 pages published so far for 1998 reveal $18.6 million in adjustments for the previous year.
David Keating, who conducts the NTU's annual expenditures study, said it is “just insane” for Congress to expect “people to search for a needle in a haystack” like this to find how lawmakers spend money. “This is a way to hide from the taxpayers,” he said. “It obviously points to the need to clear up their reporting system.”
Each member of Congress is given a firm yearly budget called the Members Representational Allowance (MRA). Each MRA is calculated separately based on factors such as the district's distance from Washington and the cost of rental space. In addition, each member is given a separate franked mail budget based on the number of households in the district. Members can go over their franking budget by $25,000 as long as they obey the overall MRA cap.
Typically, members budget conservatively during the year but engage in a relative spending spree in December. In that month, members assess how much they have left to pay bonuses and make major purchases, such as photocopiers and computers.
Many members shave their budgets closely. Three members show less than $100 remaining in their 1997 budgets, with adjustments still possible. Fully 72 members of the House spent more than 99 percent of the budget.
Budget calculations can easily go awry. Often times, for example, members and staff will request reimbursements only months, sometimes years, after the expenses are incurred.
House Inspector General John Lainhart found in a November 1998 report that more than 85 percent of congressional offices failed to submit district mail reports to the Office of Finance in time for inclusion in the December 1997 invoice.
Members are not the only ones to blame.
“Neither Office of Finance nor the United States Postal Service has adequate means of determining whether all franked mail sent from district offices was reported to Office of Finance and whether the cost of that mail was charged to the MRAs,” Lainhart wrote.
Collins said, in her case, she overspent because she erroneously believed she had enough money for a mass-mailing to residents of her district as she was preparing to leave office. In the mailing, she defended her ethical record from what she said were erroneous reports by the media.
Collins wonders whether Republicans might be playing tricks on her. “It sounds like harassment to me,” she said. “I don't know if I believe it, but what can I do?”
Retired, Collins said she has no major source of income. She still has legal bills to pay and has paid down her outstanding campaign loan. She said her legislative pension will be impounded but will cover only part of what she owes to the House.
“I intend to pay it because it's my bill,” she said. “I have to pay it. But they make me sorry I didn't run again.”
A father and son also made the list of overspenders, although the son did so only through someone else's error.
Former Rep. Harold Ford Sr. (D-Tenn.) said he miscalculated the cost of moving hundreds of boxes to Tennessee when he retired in 1996. Due to renovations, rent charges from the General Service Administration (GSA) were also higher than expected. After leaving office, he paid for the $7,505 mistake from his own bank account.
Financial records also show that his son, Harold Jr., who assumed the same seat in 1997, exceeded his budget by $4,780. But he protested that the GSA had not supplied him with an estimate of office rent, causing him to use an incorrect estimate.
In an internal agency memo, a GSA official acknowledged that Ford was right and that the GSA “has responsibility for making him ‘whole.'” On Dec. 23, the House Finance Office notified him that a GSA credit of $4,870 had wiped out his overspending.
Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) did not have such luck with the GSA. Her chief of staff, Ronnie Simmons, said Brown's accounts are not settled yet because she disputes more than $5,000 in GSA expenses.
Carole Dortch, the agency's regional administrator from Atlanta, has a different view. She wrote Brown in September saying that the GSA was settling the account by correcting an overbilling of $1,523. As a result, Brown overspent her allowance by $921.
Most members accepted responsibility without quibbling.
“It was an unfortunate administrative error,” said Alex Haught, chief of staff for Rep. Bob Clement (D-Tenn.), who repaid $221 in July. “When we learned about it, we took prompt action.” |
