Public Official Probed for Scoring Hotel Points on Taxpayer’s Dime
Jeff Edwards September 05, 2014
A San Jose public official is in hot water for allegedly earning travel rewards by continuously booking hotel rooms for his entire staff under his Hyatt and Hilton rewards numbers.
A public official in California has gone to creative and extreme measures to secure his elite Hilton HHonors status. Investigators are now saying he may have gone too far.
San Jose NBC affiliate KNTV is reporting that Santa Clara County Department of Child Support Services Director John Vartanian booked hotel rooms for 30 of the employees he supervises using his personal travel rewards credit card. Records indicate that Vartanian booked rooms for his employees under his name, using his personal Hyatt and Hilton rewards numbers.
Vartanian is accused of charging $55,000 of reimbursable hotel costs on his personal credit card since 2008, including overnight stays for conferences he did not attend.
The whistle blower in this case,Valerie Yates, a retired Department of Child Services employee, told KNTV that she discovered Vartanian’s scheme when she checked into a hotel room at a conference and was told that the room was booked in Vartanian’s name.
“The public’s tax dollars are being used so John Vartanian can go on vacation,” Yates said. “This is conscious, deliberately done, knowing he is somehow benefiting not only from his travel, but all the rest of us traveling.”
That isn’t to say Vartanian’s rewards point collecting efforts weren’t hard work. “There are conferences where he goes and attends one event, but he is there to check all the participants or registrants into the rooms,” an unnamed source told NBC Bay Area.
Vartanian’s predicament is made more precarious by Santa Clara’s strict policy regarding rewards earned while traveling on city business:
Frequent flyer credits earned by County employees for travel on County business should be applied toward future County travel. (Please note that personal use of airline frequent flyer mileage credit earned on County business is a taxable fringe benefit to the employee pursuant to the IRS regulations, and County has no intention to provide such fringe benefits.)
It is unknown whether Vartanian was aware of the rules. However, before being named director of the Department of Child Support Services, he served eight years as the department’s chief attorney.
[Photo: iStock]
This really doesn't affect the taxpayers UNLESS he specifically chose these hotels at higher rates than viable alternatives and/or increased travel when it was in fact unnecessary. The latter obviously being easier to prove than the former. Otherwise, I don't have a problem with the scheme of booking multiple rooms in your name as long as the guests are OK with that (perhaps they have their own FF account). In fact, I would hope he apply that kind of clever thinking in his job.
Somebody got greedy. Not sure that city was harmed here, but I might argue that perhaps his travel bookings for him and his staff were influenced here. I shudder to think about that policy being applied widespread in the private sector. I do not think I would work at a company that had such a policy--and enforced it.
Interesting
The lengths to which people go, after setting in place rules against others
So where's the loss to the taxpayer?