Supervisor George Shirakawa must repay the county $12,772 in expenses he wrongly charged on his government credit card, the Santa Clara County Controller-Treasurer Department reported Monday.
The county’s Finance Agency, after auditing 240 charges Shirakawa made on his procurement card, or P-Card, from 2009 to 2012, found that he had failed to comply with county rules on using the card for personal expenses, travel, charitable donations and business meals.
In its review of $36,837 in charges the supervisor placed on the card, the agency said Shirakawa violated the county’s travel policy by upgrading the class of rental vehicles without justification, overcharging for hotel rooms and not turning in expense receipts. Shirakawa, who represents part of San Jose, also charged taxpayers $10,354 for 174 business meal transactions without providing itemized receipts as the county requires, the audit found.
“In numerous instances, the county-issued P-Card was used to pay for the cardholder’s personal expenses, pay the registration fee of a political event, donate county funds to non-profit entities without (approval), or to purchase items that are either strictly prohibited or restricted under various county policies,” the agency reported in its audit released Monday.
Shirakawa, however, disputes the allegations, posting on his website that he had reimbursed the city for charges made by mistake or made upgrades using personal funds. Some receipts and copies of checks accompanied the response as evidence. The county auditors said that Shirakawa must reimburse the county $12,772 in donations to charity and other unapproved charges on the procurement card.
The Controller-Treasurer Department said it would also perform a detailed audit of expenses charged by people working for Shirakawa in his District 2 office over the same period it reviewed the supervisor’s expensing. The auditors recommended that the county consider revising policies and procedures to remove confusion regarding expense reporting and making sure the policies are implemented the same way for all county employees.
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This guy is a real beaut and the sooner the voters in his district wake up to that fact, the better. The Merc has detailed his in depth his “spending habits” with OUR taxpayers money and it reeks of corruption and a brazen attitude exhibited by few politicians in recent memory. A poor example of a public servant who shows who he’s really working for just by looking at his spending–HIMSELF. Sionara, George…
There was a piece in this morning’s Daily News where SCC Executive, Jeff Smith, claimed: “There is clearly a power differential—the feeling that people don’t want to challenge Board Members” Smith also said: “There has been reluctance to point out things that don’t make sense, and they haven’t felt comfortable bouncing that up the chain of command”.
While this overview of what happened in this case may be accurate—it opens the door to the charge that there is/has been a massive failure in SCC Government—if the County Executive is explaining that under his stewardship (and presumably that of his predecessors), that there has not been any sense of “ethics”, “morality” .. or even just “doing the right thing” created by the management structure of the SCC government.
It’s hard not to end up wit a simple take-away from County Executive Smith’s excuses for his people that there really isn’t the same kind of ethical/moral structure in the SCC government organization that one might expect in the private sector, or the Military. Nor is there any sense of “check-and-balance” in place here. Smith seems to be saying that his people don’t know what to do, or when to do it—at least when it comes to possible mismanagement of financial affairs by elected officials. (And it’s doubtful that Smith will be doing much to rectify this situation, from his feeble excuses—like provide training in ethics in the workplace—or push for a code of ethics up and down the chain-of-command within the County Government.)
One possible solution would be to put all of the credit card expenditures on-line, so that the public can see what people like Shirakawa are charging to their public accounts for themselves, rather than reading about these outrages months after the fact. For the most part, the public has no idea on what government officials are spending its money.
No wonder every where you look in California government—things are broken, with few showing any sense of awareness of how broken things really are!
Seems like there needs to be more frequent audits of local politicians, otherwise the nickel&dime level fraud slips through and does add up. Talk about a lack of ethics.
I think there is no excuse for the stuff this politician “wrongly charged” on his government credit card. He should be out the door NOW!