Where have you worked where this was the case? Or were you just making assumptions based on a best guess? Because I work for a very large company, and I can tell you this is absolutely *not *how things work here. Our company cards load transaction information directly into our expense reporting system, we’re also required to provide receipts for anything $50 or more, and pricier events require various sign-offs, on a sliding scale from managers to the CEO.
You can bet your ass that if the GOP has a remotely intelligent expense reporting system (which they should, if they’re as fiscally responsible as they claim to be :rolleyes:), a $2,000 entertainment expense had to be approved by someone, or possibly several someones. This shit doesn’t, or shouldn’t, just get handwaved off and then checked again later. (And as we can see, someone *did *get fired over it.)
More commonly, a company will provide credit cards to those of its employees who travel regularly. A small one might advance cash. But rare indeed would be the company who would expect an employee to use his own funds and only later get reimbursement. In no case that I know of would there be no supervisory review whatever of the submitted receipts to ensure their propriety - a review that would have raised questions about a $2k one from a place named “Voyeur”, if in fact such expenses violated policies or even expectations.
This guy Brown may be a sleaze, but he’s also a scapegoat.
If I were a donor to the RNC, what I would want to know is who was being entertained. Was this just RNC employees, or was there a big donor they were wooing who expected that kind of entertainment? The former would tick me off far more than the latter.
If this had been the democrats, I would want to know the same thing, but I would also be interested in what the working conditions were like in the club, where the employees treated well and did they receive benefits and adequate protections.
I am still ticked off by all the outrageously irresponsible reporting on this story. I swear that Beavis and Butthead must have gone into investigative reporting considering all the sniggering over this being done and all the questions left unanswered, especially as they are not even reporting why they don’t have the answers.
You clearly have never worked for even a small company. People that travel are very often given company cards or required to turn in receipts to recoup costs. Every single item is vetted. Even at the most lucrative business in the world, a 2K receipt to a business with Voyeur in the name will definitely be double checked. There is no way such a thing would be OK’d without permission from more than one person.
Ooooh great! Now why don’t you google for places with the word “Voyeur” in them and tell me what percentage are things the RNC wouldn’t be ashamed to have made public.
In Bricker’s defense, half the time when you use your credit card at a strip club, adult book store or similar type of business they won’t show the name of the place on your CC receipt or statement. Instead it might say something like “West Hollywood Associates LLC” or “WHV Entertainment Group” or “Western Holly Holding Company”- you get the picture. I have no idea if that’s the case here, and even if it were it doesn’t absolve the RNC, but it’s certainly a possibility.
Meanwhile, United Flight is a regular flight from Los Angeles to New York. Now possibly Michael Steele just made a quick connecting flight in LA., but that would have taken longer and cost more, as Continental has direct flights. http://www.excellent-romantic-vacations.com/air-travel-to-hawaii.html
I think that perhaps we should get the itinerary of Michael Steele for the entire day before we accept that the absence of proof is the proof of absence. Then we should find out if he knew the boys were going clubbing in advance and if he warned them of the moral hazard of hanging out at clubs, much less S & M lesbian strip clubs.
Methinks that perhaps Mickey ought to be more frothcumming. This is a scandal that keeps on getting more titillating.
RNC staffer who brought the group there, or went with them was a woman. (This makes me hot!)
According to an RNC email on the subject: “that person (Meyers) was aware that this activity was not eligible for reimbursement and had been previously counseled on this very subject. Accordingly, that staff person has been terminated.”
The Post says the Daily Caller broke this story. A few other expense tidbits from them:
Kudos to the mods for clarifying the thread title.
Rove is currently setting up an operation in competition with the RNC (American Crossroads), so it’s not surprising that he would dis Michael Steele.
The RNC reported the name and the address of the group to the FEC. Here’s the report: on the page, search under “VOYEUR WEST HOLLYWOOD”. It lists the address, the date (2/4/10), the amount (1946.25) and a description of the expense (Meals). A line item like that should have been caught at multiple points in any decent expense tracking or reporting system.
This article says that the outing included 50 Young Eagles, according to RNC sources. About a dozen went on to Voyeur. I have difficulty believing that the visit to Voyeur was a spontaneous event, given the alleged size of the group. Anyway 1946.25/12 = 162.19 per person, so I guess they had a good time. The remaining 38 truly missed a memorable and historic evening.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if this is what finally kills the Republican Party?
They get past Nixon, the wiretapping, the Reagan years and the selling arms to terrorists and funding death squads, running up impossible deficits, the Bush I gay prostitute scandal, Bush II, false wars, torture, more wiretapping, free speech zones, giving corporations all over the world full speech rights, all the closeted gay sex scandals, the kinky straight ones, etc.
What finally does them in are a bunch of horny guys watching lesbian S & M on the company dime for an expenditure of less than $2,000 and all of their fundraising is ruined.
Well, I suspect the corporate cash will keep flowing. And Citizen’s United provides a new conduit for transforming money into power and then back into money. In a pinch, they can always hit up the Daredevil Dozen: the RNC would hate their names to fall into the wrong hands, wouldn’t they?
It would be an even bigger hoot if it saves the party. The idea of lesbian strip clubs becomes a magnet for younger members, and sends off all the fundies in a tizzy to form a 3rd party,
Thanks for finding the report. I looked for it and failed to find it.
The last two pages list salaries. I was surprised to see there are people who draw higher salaries than Michael Steele. Their names are Gentry Collins and Todd Herman. Steele, BTW, is paid just over $5300 every two weeks, about $138,000 per year, not including bribes.
A little more Googling shows that Gentry Collins is the RNC’s Political Director. Todd Herman is the RNC’s Director of New Media.
One more interesting thing – other than payroll, Michael Steele’s name *never *appears on the report. Browsing through it seems as if many if not most of the staff incur expenses they are later reimbursed for. Not Steele. Apparently he’s not willing to go out of pocket for anything. That’s very unusual – in my experience, the higher up someone is in an organization, the more likely it is they will at some point need to lay out some bucks and be paid back.
Yes. Seriously. Especially when you have to file expense reports with the FEC.
I was a bankruptcy paralegal for about a year. As you surely know, counsel had to submit their bills to the bankruptcy judge so that they can be paid by the estate. One of my jobs was to review bills just to make sure stuff like this didn’t slip by. If some travel expenses looked curious, the associates were questioned.
I have since then worked in the credit card industry. Since then, there has been tremendous scrutiny on travel expenses in part to avoid this sort of PR fiasco. It’s not the end of the world that the RNC brought clients to a sex show, but it does speak to an organizational inadequacy that they did not catch this internally.
I don’t see what is so unreasonable about expecting a little more diligence when you are subject to scrutiny. Your standards in this case seem to be surprisingly low.
When I flew back from Maui on United, it was listed as a through flight to Chicago, but we landed in LA, refueled, and had passengers get on and off the plane. And the new passengers had a different flight number, the usual one for the regular flight from LAX to O’Hare.
Why not take a direct flight on Continental? Frequent Flier miles? RNC organizational policy? And you might want to do some checking. That website you link to says the prices are from 2007. And a quick check on Kayak.com does not show any direct flights from Honolulu to NYC at the moment.
All in all, I would say you are really reaching here.
