How does one justify travel expenses? Very easily if you work for our government. It would seem to be an open door to charge up anything and everything. To claim and obtain everything and anything.

Auditor General, Sue Winspear, in her latest report said entertainment, hospitality and travel costs are vulnerable to “abuse and misuse” because some government departments have not drawn up formal business cases to justify and explain these expenditures.

She has advocated that without formal justification, government departments could be spending money on travel without knowing if it achieved an objective.

“Could be”? Change that to “ARE”.

The difficulty is how does one ascertain if a trip is actually value for money? The “value” may come later.

Winspeare believes that teleconferencing should be looked at as an alternative to traveling.

Surprise. Surprise. She found OfReg had no travel policy in place nor was there any business cases to justify nearly a quarter of a million dollars spent on travel in one year!! The executive director of OfReg even obtained a new car without any approval from anyone.

I loved the OfReg management statement saying relevant policies would all be in place this year and in future all travel by its team would be justified.

What?

Are they actually admitting that in the past all its travel last year was not justified?

And where did all the fees disappear to that were intended to fund the OfReg office?

If ever there was a new department set up by government that is incompetent from its head to its tail and does absolutely nothing to justify its existence is OfReg.

Get rid of it now. One could even justify the travel expenses if everybody connected with it was sent away by one of our planes.