Editorial: Pentagon needs a new kind of trigger

Tuesday, March 19, 2002 | 8:56 a.m.

Seven hundred military officers have defaulted on $1.1 million charged to their government-issued credit cards. And a Navy employee recently promoted to oversee Army finances was discovered to have defaulted on $12,000 worth of personal items on her government credit card. The revelations prompted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to order the Pentagon controller to investigate.

The Pentagon should take a lesson from Nevada. We had our own taste of government- issued credit card abuse a couple years ago, when state employees had run up $71,000 in bad debts. In response, the state government adopted new controls. All but $4,000 has since been collected and triggers are now in place. An employee 60 days in arrears gets a notice -- 30 more days and the card is suspended. Sounds like the Pentagon needs some new accounting triggers of its own.

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