Re:
DoD Mandates Online Travel System
The problem with the article, and with DoD's Travel System, is that it mixes apples and oranges. DTS consists of two parts: (1) the financial system, which processes travel vouchers; and (2) the travel reservation system.
DTS has been very successful in saving the Government money and TDY travelers' time, in processing travel vouchers. As Darby Smith points out in the article, the cost to process a travel claim is reduced from $37 when done manually, to $2 when done through DTS.
However--and this is a BIG however--the front-end travel reservation system of DTS is what contains all the flaws. What good is it to save $35 on processing a voucher, if the traveler spends several hundred dollars more on the plane ticket in the first place? That's the part that Congress and travel agents take issue with.
Technology should be used to make the tasks we already do easier. It should NOT be used to add work. Thus, the DTS financial system should be used to help government travelers reduce the time they spend submitting their travel claims--this is something they used to do before and DTS makes it cheaper and faster to do it now.
But travelers are not travel agents. That's not something they did before. Sure, they do it for themselves online for their own personal travel. But that is their money they are spending, not the government's. And it is their free time. Now, with DTS, we have judges, government executives, etc., who make $150,000 a year, spending time making reservations when a $25,000/year travel clerk should be doing it.
The DTS mandate, in the end, will cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year in lost time and unwisely spent travel dollars--waste that will never be made up by the savings in the voucher-processing costs.
~ Josephine L. Ursini, Law Offices of Josephine L. Ursini, counsel for many of the government travel companies that do business with the government
