Department of Homeland Security

In 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made considerable progress developing and implementing a biometric capability to track air passenger exits using facial recognition technology. CBP’s Biometric Entry-Exit Program conducted a pilot at nine airports and demonstrated ability using this...

In December 2014, OIG previously reported on the effectiveness and cost of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) program. Our report disclosed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had not developed performance measures needed to accurately assess program effectiveness and make informed...

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has inadequate controls for verifying that foreign nationals seeking lawful permanent residence status meet health-related standards for admissibility. First, USCIS is not properly vetting the physicians it designates as civil surgeons. We determined...

We determined that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not analyze program needs to determine how many additional 287(g) program managers should be hired and was not able to hire enough to keep up with the quick expansion. In addition, a lack of information technology (IT) support...

In FY 2017, we issued 37 reports concerning Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grants, programs, and operations. The reports included 16 grant audits, 13 proactive audits, and 8 program audits. Our balanced review approach continues to produce a significant number of recommendations that...

FEMA needs to continue providing technical assistance to and monitoring of California’s Public Assistance grant funding management. This helps avoid the risk of exposing millions of taxpayer dollars to fraud, waste, or mismanagement and violating the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency...

We determined that not all forms DHS and its components use to create Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) include the required Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) statement. Further, although many of the settlement agreement templates and settlement agreements in the sample we reviewed...

DHS did not comply with the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act (IPERA) because it did not meet one of the six IPERA requirements. Specifically, DHS did not meet its annual reduction targets for 2 of 14 programs. Additionally, we determined that DHS did not provide adequate oversight of...

We found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) overpaid its employees because it mistakenly believed the Department’s payroll provider had an automated control to prevent payments over the annual cap, and because it did not follow its own premium pay policy. We also found that FEMA has...

We determined that the Federal Air Marshall Services’ (FAMS) could not demonstrate the extent its ground-based activities’ contributed to the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) mission. FAMS lacked performance measures for most ground-based activities and could not provide a budget...