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.