by:  Diane Benjamin

This information was received under the Freedom of Information Act.

According to the City of Bloomington, 225 employees have City p-cards.  Commerce Bank administers these cards and automatically takes the payment from the City account.  A 40-50 page statement of charges is then sent to the City.  During 2012, a total off $2,438,480 was charged by employees.  I filed another FOIA request for information on who verifies the charges, still waiting for that information.

I do have a list of employees holding these cards.  At least 1 person on the list is NOT an employee and hasn’t been since around 2010.  Hopefully they are checking the charges better than they check the card holders!

There are many charges on the statements that I will be questioning.  Is it okay with you, the taxpayer, that an employee charged $4.00 at Starbucks?

This post is about bigger fish though, travel expenses.  Taxpayers should know what they are paying for.  It would be nice to know how they justify travel since the people they serve reside in Bloomington, maybe the citizens should ask.

Below are the travel charges that appeared on the January-April 2012 statements.  That means the travel took place from December 2011-March 2012.  December isn’t a big travel month because of the holidays, so it is less than normal that month.  These trips were taken by many different employees.  The odd part is trip expenses, like food, were not charged on their p-card.  That leads me to believe expense reports were filed by the employees, then the City reimbursed them.

Be sure to check out the TOTAL.  This is only for 4 months, imagine what an entire year looks like.  I can’t guarantee charges weren’t missed – these statements are VERY long.  Identical charges indicate more than one person traveled.