WASHINGTON USO accounting under review over luxury expenditures for entertainers

Donations are supposed to pay for first-class tickets and other perks.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- When Jennifer Lopez, Kid Rock and Ja Rule put on a concert for 1,500 troops at the height of the war in Afghanistan, it was seen as another success for the United Services Organization, which for 63 years has been entertaining soldiers overseas.
But now the spotlight is on a team of government auditors who uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexplained expenses the USO submitted for the show.
The J.Lo gig was among several cited in a General Accounting Office report released this month that found more than $430,000 in improper, questionable or unsupported USO tour expenses charged to the Pentagon over a two-year period.
The GAO study, which looked at 10 randomly selected tours during 2000 and 2001, found no evidence of malfeasance in the nonprofit organization's use of government money. Nor was there any finding that the entertainers did anything wrong.
Luxury expenses
But the investigation, requested by Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., found that taxpayers repeatedly paid for first-class plane tickets, liquor and limousine services for celebrities, in violation of Pentagon and federal regulations.
Any such luxury expenses are supposed to be paid out of the USO's private donations, not the money it gets from Congress. The GAO report blamed sloppy bookkeeping by ill-trained employees.
The investigation, however, did prompt the Pentagon's Armed Forces Entertainment division, which disburses federal funds to the USO, to review all tours since 1998; so far, it has uncovered an additional $73,000 in improper payments and recovered more than $140,000 from the USO.
Col. Janice Long, chief of Armed Forces Entertainment, acknowledged in an interview that the review was not comprehensive. She said the division needs additional information to know how many more airplane ticket upgrades were paid for in violation of federal travel regulations.