More credit-card abuse, this time at MU

There were more headlines last week about credit-card abuses by government employees. In this case, another audit of how University of Missouri employees use credit cards revealed lots of questionable charges, not to mention lax accountability.

There were 23 audits of the university's credit cards in 2001 and 2002, and problems were found in 18 of those checks.

And how does the university respond? "The potential in any large organization or misuse is always there," said Nikki Krawitz, MU's vice president for finance. She said there were bound to be problems with so many transactions -- 335,000 in 2002 alone.

If MU employees responsible for the misuse of credit cards are being reprimanded or penalized in some way, it isn't being publicized. As a matter of fact, the university fought long and hard to keep from turning over its credit-card records to The Kansas City Star. After a five-year legal battle, The Star and MU reached a settlement and agreed that the audits were public records.

Those records held plenty of interesting information. A university employee charged what appears to be more than $5,000 in personal items. One in five credit-card receipts were missing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus. Some card holders have credit limits as high as $25,000. Last year, 5,300 cardholders in the university system ran up charges of more than $75 million, an average of $14,150 for each cardholder.

In spite of the documented abuses and the potential for further problems, the university system continues to encourage employees to use credit cards. State Auditor Claire McCaskill, who has audited the use of credit cards by other state employees outside the university system, says employers invite financial risk by issuing too many credit cards with credit limits that are too high.

Time after time, there are headlines about the problems with using credit cards to spend taxpayers' money. But there are no headlines about how beneficial credit cards are in the hands of employees who are monitored by huge bureaucracies and have ample opportunity to slip in a few personal purchases or who suffer no consequences when receipts are lost.

The MU system, like state-funded colleges and universities across Missouri, is facing an unprecedented financial bind as the legislature looks to balance the next fiscal year's budget by cutting $89 million from higher education.

The problems uncovered by The Star's probe only serve to emphasize the pitfalls of putting loosely controlled credit cards into the hands of people who don't have to pay the monthly statements when they arrive.

If credit cards have any role in government, they must be strictly monitored.

For the most part, the anticipated benefits of credit cards are outweighed by abuses that have an impact far beyond the issues of employee dishonesty.