I've seen a couple of posts on the emerging scandal of Sarah Palin's per diem reimbursements for travel. After a bit of reasearch into the Sarah Palin's own Division of Finance regulations on travel I can reach one inescapable conclusion: Sarah Palin falsified her travel reimbursement reports and broke the law of her own adminstative agency charged with oversight of the state's Travel Office. That's only half of the equation.
The second half asks the question: Did Sarah Palin report her travel expenses properly to the IRS and the Alaska Department of Revenue? If she didn't, then she may have committed tax fraud which means she's on the fast track to being booted from the Republican ticket. It's a big deal when a candidate for any public office cheats on their taxes and I can't imagine McCain retaining Sarah Palin if her tax returns don't add up.
The most revealing fact about Sarah Palin's travel documents is that she spent 312 days at home in her house and she makes the rather specious claim she was governing the state of Alaska from her house, over 600 miles away from Juneau the state capital.
One of Mrs. Palin's staff make this rather makes this misleading statement about her per diem reimbursements:
Ms. Palin was able to receive the allotment while she was at home because her official "duty station" is listed as Juneau, the state capital, aides said. That allowed Ms. Palin to file for per diems while she was working out of her Anchorage office and commuting from her home about 45 miles away in Wasilla. Juneau is nearly 600 miles away.
Section 60.020 of the Division of Finances regulations under Travel Definitions (04-08) defines "travel" as the use of :
A commercial lodging facility that is a licensed entitiy that is the business of selling lodging to the general public and includes hotels, inns, motels, apartments and campgrounds.
Under the same chapter of law, a duty station is defined as:
The city town or village within a 50 radius where the traveler spends the major portion of their working time.
So the entire meaning of the Alaska Division of Finance's regulations governing travel reimbursement is based on the premise that one has to travel to some destination in order to receive travel reimbursement. As uncomplicated as that seems, Sarah Palin broke the law because she wasn't traveling.
A large portion of the "duty station" reimbursement taken by Governor Palin was for "dining out" in her hometown during her 312 days "at home." So it would appear that the taxpayers of Alaska were picking up the tab, for Governor Palin's meals with her family at the local Wasilla Red Lobster or Pizza Hut.
On those 312 days in question Sarah Palin wasn't a traveler, she did not commute 45 miles from her home in Wasilla to the duty station in Anchorage, nor was she staying at a commercial lodging facility. She was at home presumably governing Alaska. Therefore Sarah Palin was falsifying her expense report according to the Alaska Division of Finance regulations.
In fact the Alaska state legislature has been concerned about Sarah Palin's absenteeism as of late.
An AP story tells about her no-show at a special legislative session that she called to order herself:
She called the Alaska Legislature into special session recently, but didn't show up, prompting someone at the Capitol to make buttons that read, "Where's Sarah?"
Spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said Palin is in Juneau when she needs to be.
"Her job as governor of Alaska takes her all across the state," Leighow said. "She travels quite extensively."
So does her family. Newspaper investigations have found the state regularly flies Palin's husband and children to events around Alaska and elsewhere, either on a state-owned turboprop plane or commercial flights.
Palin's husband and children have charged the state $43,490 to travel over the past year. The department regulation on travel for is that when the governor travels with a companion or spouse she is reimbursed on a 50/50 basis for the expenses of "both" travelers. If she travels with more than one companion, she's on her own and is required to pay for full travel and lodging expenses for any and all travelers other than a single companion. See companion fare waiver memorandum under travel regs of the Division of Finance.
So if Governor Palin was traveling with more than one family member and claimed reimbursements for more than one, she is not in compliance with her own Division of Finance regulations on travel.
The other lingering question is that for the purposes of taxation Sarah Palin is required to report the $60,000+ per diem reimbursements as income on both her state and federal tax forms. So far the McCain/Palin camp have declared discussions of Palin's travel expenses off limits, but she may have committed tax fraud if she failed to report her travel reimbursement to the IRS and the Alaska Department of Revenue.
Even worse, she may have taken deductions for travel expenses for which she was reimbursed. More than a few tax cheats receive a reimbursement check from their company on travel expenses, but then have the gall to deduct those fully reimbursed business expenses from their taxes.
CBS News reported that as part of the McCain vetting process, Sarah Palin submitted 7 years of tax returns to the McCain campaign.
Palin also submitted tax returns for more than seven years and prior public disclosures including articles she had written that aren't in the public domain.
So why hasn't the McCain campaign released those tax returns to the public?
I recently did some checking around about governor's salaries and found out that of the 40 states with part-time legislatures found out these interesting facts:
1. Sarah Palin's salary of as governor is the fourth highest in those 40 states with part time legislatures.
2.The other states that pay the governor more than Alaska (population: 683,000) & are Georgia(population:9.4 million), North Carolina (population: 9.1 millon) and Washington (population 6.5 million)..
3. When you factor in her bogus travel reimbursement as income as the IRS does, her real salary is second only to Arnold's salary as California (population: 37.6 million) governor.
In that context, Sarah Palin can't play the "I'm just humble underpaid civi servant" card. Politics have been very good to Sarah Palin, who jumped from 5 different schools before obtaining a BA in Communications from the University of Idaho.
Sarah Palin has presented herself as a populist reformer who sold the state owned airplane on eBay and crusaded against the waste of taxpayer dollars, but the emerging evidence of her per diem reimbursements on state related travel expenses shows several cracks in the plaster of her carefully sculpted public facade.
In fact, Sarah Palin has relied on entirely on surrogates to field the sticky questions about her own little scandal. If that's the kind of open government Sarah Palin runs I say, "No thanks, Sarah we've already got that kind of "open" government in the White House already.
Steve Schmidt, McCain's director of operations knows that it would be a disaster if Sarah Palin answered any questions about her travel reimbursment in an impromptu manner. The Republicans have wagered the farm, the livestock, the tractor and their first born child on the success of Sarah Palin. If she fails, the Republican Party fails.
Such are consquences of the strange Republican fetish with the cult of the personality.
The arrogance of Republicans is their undying belief that the rule of law appies to everyone but Republicans. As a result we've seen a Republican feeding frenzy of greed and corruption that has inundated every level of government during the Republican "renaissance" of the past 8 years. I'm told that Sarah Palin is the "face" of the new Republican Party but I still keep seeing Dick Cheney wearing lipstick and a bouffant wig.