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Al's Morning Meeting

Story ideas that you can localize and enterprise. Posted by 7:30 a.m. Mon-Fri.

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A dozen sites
I'm diggin'

1. "She's like a moose going after a cabbage." A fun piece watching the Palin speech with locals in Alaska.

2. Track Hannah with these storm tools I created on Ning.

3. Stay on top of Hannah with this site that includes radar, satellite, tracking maps, warnings and more.

4. The coolest storm tracking site I have seen in a while.

5. The site watches TV and Web mentions of candidates. It also monitors Tweets and more.

6. Instead of scheduling meetings by e-mail, everybody can work out a time and date online.

7. Here are tons of GREAT tools that will help you find anything on flickr.

8. Vloggerheads fights back against YouTube chaos.

9. YouTomb is where videos go after they're booted off YouTube.

10. The evolution of voting in America is shown by interactive mapping.

11. I have never seen anything like this amazing "Swan Lake" performance. [Flash]

12. This is my current home page.

All of my Diggin' sites are saved on Poynter's del.icio.us page.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. We will correct errors and inaccuracies when we become aware of them.

The GAO Discovers Lavish Government Credit Card Spending

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit found government workers using their government-issued credit cards to gamble, make car and mortgage payments and more.

The audit said that in hundreds of cases, inspectors could not even locate the stuff that had been purchased. Nearly half of all purchases were not properly authorized. Remember, this is hardly the first time this has happened -- similar findings turned up in 2002.

Here is a taste of the audit results, which can be found in the GAO report, linked to on this page:

A postmaster at USPS used his government purchase card to fraudulently subscribe to two Internet dating services over 15 consecutive months (April 2004 through October 2006). The monthly charges for these dating services were the only charges that appeared on the cardholder's monthly statements during this period; yet each of these charges was authorized and paid for by USPS. The cardholder paid restitution of over $1,100 but faced no disciplinary action for this fraud.

From October 2000 through September 2006, a cardholder at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) fraudulently paid over $642,000 to a live-in boyfriend who shared the same bank account as the cardholder. The $642,000 was used for personal expenditures, such as gambling, car loan and mortgage payments, and other retail purchases. The activities took place over a 6-year period, but were not detected by the agency until a whistleblower reported the cardholder to the agency’s Office of Inspector General in 2006. The cardholder was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of over $642,000.

One USDA cardholder used year-end funds to acquire a Toyota Sienna and a Toyota Land Cruiser totaling nearly $80,000. Although the purchases were made at the request of two Foreign Agricultural Service offices, the cardholder violated agency policy by failing to acquire a GSA waiver.20 The cardholder also used four convenience checks, purchasing the Toyota Sienna with one check and splitting the payment for the Land Cruiser into three separate checks because its purchase price exceeded the convenience checks' maximum purchase limit. Although documentation from USDA showed that the vehicles were shipped overseas to the units that requested them, we did not perform additional work to determine whether these vehicles represented a valid government need.

Posted by Al Tompkins 11:57 PM April 11, 2008

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