'Secretly fleecing taxpayers:' Nancy Mace faces ethics probe over ritzy D.C. townhouse

South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace has been accused of "secretly fleecing taxpayers" in an ethics complaint filed this week on the heels of a lengthy Washington Post exposé on reimbursement requests linked to her D.C. townhouse.

Members of Mace's staff provided details about her spending habits to the Post, which published the report Tuesday.

"Mace was told by people involved with her office finances that she could not justify claiming more than about $1,800 a month for expenses on the townhouse, according to two people familiar with the discussions," the paper said. "One source showed The Post a document laying out Mace’s monthly expenses for the townhouse and calculating them as $1,726."

What's more, three sources told the paper that Mace "instructed her staff to seek the maximum reimbursement each day the House was in session, regardless of her actual expenses."

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Mace denied the allegations but did not provide the Post with a detailed breakdown of her expenses.

The report became the foundation of a complaint filed with the Office of Congressional Ethics on Tuesday, calling for an investigation into whether Mace violated rules that ban congress members from seeking reimbursements that exceed their actual lodging costs.

The complaint was obtained by Punchbowl News.

"Representative Mace has violated House Ethics Rules by repeatedly seeking reimbursement for lodging in excess of the actual monthly expense of maintaining her co-owned townhouse in Washington, D.C., resulting in a misuse of taxpayer funds for purposes unrelated to her official duties," the complaint said.

The complaint added that Mace "clearly violated" the ban on excessive reimbursement requests, pointing directly to what her own staffers alleged.

"This allegation alone deserves further investigation as well as interviews of former staff," the complaint said. "If true, then this is a flagrant abuse of House Rules and a clear example of a Member secretly fleecing taxpayers."

Furthermore, the complaint said, if the former staffers' account proves to be true, that raises even more questions about what happened to the thousands of dollars in excess money.

"Money is fungible, so the thousands of excess dollars received by Rep. Mace could conceivably have been put towards any use," the complaint said, adding that if it was used to cover her mortgage on a $1.6 million townhome, that would twice violate House rules.

In response to a request for a copy of the complaint, a spokesman for the Office of Congressional Ethics told Raw Story that rules prohibit the office from responding to the request.