GSA Chief’s Debt Minor, Audit Shows : Expenses: Roger Johnson owed government $72 and has paid it. Office says his ‘unfamiliarity with official travel rules’ caused the blunder.

A second government audit of General Administration chief Roger W. Johnson’s travel expenses has concluded he owed the government $72 for improperly using his government credit card and mixing personal and commercial trips, but he already has paid the debt.

The GSA inspector general’s office blamed the former Orange County businessman’s “unfamiliarity with official travel rules” for most of the mistakes but raps his knuckles, nonetheless, for the series of administrative blunders.

While his official debt to the government is modest, the episode has been an embarrassment for the former chief executive of Western Digital. He has already paid $807 back to the government based on a previous, more stringent audit of the same travel vouchers by the GSA’s chief financial officer. That $807 included the $72 debt listed by the inspector general.

GSA spokesman Hap Connors explained that the audit by Chief Financial Officer Dennis J. Fischer released March 17 “used a higher standard . . . and focused on any travel expense that was unclear or gave the appearance of misunderstanding.” The inspector general’s audit was more basic, Connors said.

Johnson was at a conference in Atlanta on Monday and was unavailable for comment. But Connors said the inspector general’s report “highlighted needed changes in GSA travel regulations that had been suspected by the chief financial officer and have since been corrected. The bottom line is that Johnson has already written a check for $807 because he wanted to resolve the entire issue and get back to bigger tasks, like reshaping the GSA.”

Johnson, one of only a few Republicans named to a high-level post in the Clinton Administration, was confirmed last July. Connors has previously described the scrutiny of the travel expenses as an attempt to discredit Johnson over his efforts to restructure the $60-billion agency.

Johnson’s series of missteps, Connors said, “resulted from a lack of understanding about GSA regulations, as opposed to those in the private sector. The whole inquiry gave added impetus to fine-tuning those regulations.”

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Most of the trips in question were diversions to his Laguna Beach home while on official business in the region. The audit specifically refers to two departures--Salt Lake City to Seattle and Orange County to Washington--as “deviations from official travel for personal use.” The $72 represents the difference between the government-approved rates for the travel and the slightly higher commercial rates Johnson obtained.

Johnson called for the internal audit after the Wall Street Journal raised questions about the travel records in mid-March.

The inspector general’s audit, dated April 20 but released Monday, covered 13 travel vouchers between July 7, 1993 and March 18, 1994. In a addition to calling for the $72 reimbursement, the inspector general asked Johnson to:

* Use government air fares and government credit cards only for official travel.

* Submit all outstanding vouchers and future vouchers “within prescribed time frames.”

* Establish a file “to support the official nature of each trip and deviations.”

Last week, Johnson announced he also planned to repay the government $256 for 184 long-distance phone calls and 39 overnight pieces of mail that his staff determined to be for personal use.

The GSA manages the government’s vast real estate holdings and does much of its purchasing.