Photo Credit: m01229 / Creative CommonsThe federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.

The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public.

A series of other recent purchases, reviewed by internal government auditors, include wasteful and inappropriate purchases by government employees — including a gym membership and JC Penney clothing — that were not detected or stopped until after the purchase was completed.

The I-Team’s findings have been the subject of a Congressional hearing and created scrutiny from taxpayer watchdogs for the Department of Homeland Security, which made the Starbucks purchases and declines to publicly detail them.

A “micropurchase” is a purchase costing less than $3,000 in which a government-issued purchase card is swiped. The U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Defense, each made tens of millions of dollars of “micropurchases” in the past year, according to an I-Team review. But each agency said it does not make public an itemized list of its transactions, limiting the information to internal government reviewers and users of the federal Freedom of Information Act.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Eric ThayerReport: DHS employees put $30,000 worth of Starbucks on government credit card

By Colby Itkowitz.

Federal employees who are issued so-called purchase cards are permitted to spend up to $3,000 — known as “micropurchases” — and do not have to disclose those purchases publicly.

A House Oversight subcommittee held a congressional hearing earlier this month on misuses of the government credit card, asking why federal employees were swiping the card for seemingly personal things like hair cuts, gym memberships and movie tickets.

Scott MacFarlane, investigative reporter at NBC-4 Washington, discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests, that Department of Homeland Security employees put $30,000 of Starbucks on the cards in 2013. Agency employees spent about $12,000 at one Starbucks in Alameda, Calif., and several of those purchases were for just under the $3,000 “micropurchase” threshold, which means they can avoid scrutiny.

“I don’t know the agency’s needs or contingencies, but going to Starbucks seems like a really hard sell,” former Inspector General for the U.S. General Services Administration Brian Miller told MacFarlane in an interview.

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