The $2.6 million spent by a Toyota auto plant in Kentucky to train 545 workers who did not qualify as needy is just one of many questionable expenses within federal job training programs, Labor Department investigators say. Many of the workers at the Scott County, Ky., plant were working fulltime and therefore ineligible for the Job Training Partnership Act program, the department's inspector general's office said in documents submitted to Congress on Wednesday. But Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, testifying before the documents were addressed, said the $3 billion-a-year program has been ``remarkably free'' of fraud and abuse. Loopholes in federal law resulted in such examples as officials in Portage, Wis., spending $22,000 of federal job training money on dinner cruises and Christmas parties, Mrs. Dole told the House Education and Labor Committee. In that case, officials put job-training advance funds in the bank and then spent the interest, she said. The Senate has already passed a measure to clarify that interest earned on federal job training funds must be spent on job training, she said. Other questionable expenses outlined by the inspector general's office included: _$718,768 spent by the Houston Job Training Partnership Council for enrolling and training security guards at a cost of $3,000 each. The contractor billed for nearly 400 hours of training for each participant, even though Texas only requires 26 hours of training for registration as an armed security guard, auditors said. _$33,801 paid to a subcontractor in Michigan for placing college students in jobs they had found themselves, or with employers for whom they had previously worked or in jobs in which the employers would have hired them without federal assistance. _$640,000 spent in Louisiana to install a high-tech training center at Northwestern State University. Purchases included television cameras, satellite disks and computers. No dislocated workers were served, the auditors found. _$90,155 for inflated placement claims at the Full Employment Council of Kansas City, Mo. Another $90,000 was questioned because employers could not or would not provide payroll records to support on-the-job-training claims. Mrs. Dole said that of the thousands of private businessmen who have helped administer JTPA funds, there have been only 24 allegations of conflicts of interest. ``We believe this is an impressive record,'' she said. The overall operation of the program has been ``remarkably free of instances of fraud, abuse or other wrongdoing,'' the labor secretary said. However, she said misuse of funds was ``inevitable'' in a program as large as JTPA, which has received $21 billion since it was created seven years ago. Mrs. Dole, who supports tougher record-keeping requirements, also called on Congress to tighten eligibility requirements so the neediest cases would benefit from the program. She said she backed narrowing the requirements so the program would be more focused on people who lacked basic skills, those who are high school dropouts or those with disabilities. ``We must target ... the tougher cases, the ones who are not going to make it without our intervention,'' Mrs. Dole said.
