Missouri governor's office logged no purpose for $375K in flights

A Missouri State Auditor review⧉ of the Office of Governor found 58 of 174 state-aircraft trips -- costing $375,160 -- had no documented business purpose, part of six findings covering travel, employee pay, and how the office handled other agencies' money.▸ Accumulated across the audit's roughly two-and-a-half-year span, that undocumented flight total still runs nearly 2.7 times a single year of the Governor's own salary -- $139,000 to $141,000, a figure the audit tracked separately from the office's travel spending.

The audit⧉ covered July 1, 2024 through January 13, 2025 and the two fiscal years before it -- spanning the final stretch of former Governor Mike Parson's tenure and the start of Governor Mike Kehoe's. Flight records for the office's 174 state-aircraft trips gave only generic descriptions, such as "Flight for Governor Parson," and for 58 of them -- a third of the total -- auditors could find no specific state-business purpose in the office's own records or in archived news releases and media advisories.

Some of the flights had clearer, if debatable, purposes.▸ The Governor made 16 flights in 2024 tied to a book tour for his commemorative biography; one, to the publisher's site in Marceline with no other activity planned, cost $1,386. A December 2023 flight to Arlington, Texas carried the spouses of the Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff -- against state policy limiting spouses on state aircraft to the First Lady -- for what Parson said was the Cotton Bowl. And the office paid $355 in lodging for the Governor to play in a golf tournament in Illinois, which Parson said he attended at the request of Missouri John Deere dealerships.

Two more findings involve staff.▸ The office paid four top-level employees $28,058 in compensatory time across two occasions -- $15,358 to three employees in December 2023, $12,700 to three employees in June 2024 -- without adequate documentation of hours actually worked, a violation of state policy that doesn't allow such payments to this employee class. Separately, the office made 12 tuition-reimbursement payments totaling $30,449 that weren't allowed under office policy or properly approved; 10 of the 12 lacked a required approval form. The former Chief of Staff, who'd received $15,000 of those reimbursements in the year before he resigned, began repaying them in September 2024 -- but stopped after three payments totaling $4,200, once Parson waived the rest.

The largest single figure has nothing to do with the Governor personally: in June 2024, the office directed the state's accounting system to reclassify $421,822 in expenses -- Capitol remodeling work, grain-inspection and state-fair costs -- from the Office of Administration and the Department of Agriculture onto the Governor's office budget instead, plus a further $50,000 toward a Department of Economic Development contractor bill.▸ In total, $472,000 in FY2024 costs that belonged to other agencies' appropriations ended up charged to the Governor's office, with no written agreement explaining why.

The mansion hosted about 160 events during the audit period.▸ Food for those events and for the Governor and First Lady's personal use totaled roughly $210,000, drawn from three different funding sources, but the office's event forms had no field to record a business purpose or itemize cost by event -- so auditors could not determine what individual events cost or, for about 12 dinners and luncheons involving friends and family, whether they served any state purpose at all.

Former Governor Parson disputes the findings outright.▸ In his written response, he says his team met with auditors to walk through each finding and that none of it amounts to misconduct: "None of the issues cited constitute unethical conduct. At most, they reflect differences in interpretation or perception -- not wrongdoing," and that once an administration leaves office it loses access to the records auditors later review. Current Governor Kehoe's response addresses this audit alongside a separate review of the Lieutenant Governor's office, a post he held before becoming governor; it does not dispute the findings the same way.