EXCLUSIVE: New Audit Spells Out Potential Telework Abuse In Government Agency

A new audit from the Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed potential discrepancies involving over 10% of telework agreements.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa requested in August 2023 that government agencies conduct audits of telework and remote work, citing a media account of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee who attended a staff meeting while taking a bubble bath. The HUD report, released Tuesday, found that several employees lived over 2,000 miles from the offices they were supposed to work in.

“Five of these employees had Flexiplace agreements indicating that they commuted more than 2,000 miles every week from one side of the United States to the other or from the mainland United States to Hawaii,” the report said.

HUD established the Flexiplace program to regulate remote and telework in 2022, defining teleworkers as employees who report to the office on a set number of days and remote workers as employees who don’t show up at an office, according to the report. The report also noted that at least 30 employees lived more than 1,000 miles away from their on-site work location, while another 35 did not have valid data.

“The calendar just flipped to October, but with so many ghost employees and haunted empty halls, it has been spooky season at the Biden-Harris HUD office buildings for four years,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation