There are those who regard a blank company expense-account form as an artist looks at an empty canvas — a blank space on which to create wonders.

Certain professions more than others are known for their creativity when submitting summaries of their business expenses. Newspaper and television reporters are notorious in this regard, possibly because most of them are accomplished writers. The anecdotes relating to the expense accounts they’ve handed in are endless.

Of course, everyone always says politicians treat their expense accounts like bottomless pits of cash. This may be so, and it may be one reason why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the other week that the House of Representatives would begin posting representatives’ expense accounts online by the end of August, so that everyone could see where millions of taxpayer dollars are going.

Those reports are now on paper. Few people read them and they just keep piling up on Capitol Hill.

Our representatives in Washington spend a lot of money. Much of it is on staff and lots on things like cars, catering, computers and communications. There are many other things that make people who don’t have expense accounts, and even some who do, quite irate.

A few years ago, senators said they bought so much stuff it would make the detailed reports of their spending too unwieldy, so they passed a rule change for themselves in 2000 that lets senators avoid filing expense accounts for much of their spending.

You may think that this is simply the way things have developed as the government has grown to gargantuan size. It may surprise you to know how very slightly changed today’s public servant is from those who began the whole game.

Read, if you can still find a copy, the little known book, George Washington’s Expense Account, by George Washington and Marvin Kitman. It tells how Washington refused a salary as commander of the Continental Army because he regarded that job as his sacred duty to his fellow revolutionaries. However, Washington did say that he’d let the Continental Congress reimburse him for any incidental expenses he might incur as he led our fight against Great Britain.

At the end, after eight years of the war, including the winter at Valley Forge, Kitman says, Washington managed to gain 30 pounds and submitted an expense account to the Congress for $449,000. That would be about $4 million in today’s dollars. Washington had bought horses and saddles, luggage and delicacies, pigs and ducks, limes by the crate, liquor and wine by the barrel. There’s also an abundance of entries under that most wonderful of expense-account headings: “Miscellaneous.”

Others put a somewhat lower total number on Washington’s expense account, but you get the point and you can look it up for yourself. It’s in Washington’s own handwriting and on display in the Library of Congress.

It may be that the Father of Our Country was also the father of creative expense accounts submitted to Congress.

Congress found a small error in Washington’s addition, so they upped the total by 89 cents and approved it all.

When Washington was made the new nation’s first president, he offered to do the same thing — take no salary, just get an expense account. The Congress, in its wisdom, declined and gave him a $25,000-a-year salary.

— Truman Taylor ( TrumanBTaylor@aol.com)