FEMA's Waiver Authority under the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018

Several challenges limited our ability to fulfill by audit the mandate in Section 1216 of the DRRA. For instance, FEMA’s data system does not capture Individuals and Households Program (IHP) assistance data in a manner that allows us to accurately calculate a percentage of distributions made in error in any 12-month period. In addition, the amount of data required to conduct the audit represents millions of rows of data, as well as underlying supporting documents. These efforts require considerable resources for FEMA to provide, and the Office of Inspector General to review, the IHP information. Facing these limitations, we adopted an alternate approach to estimate FEMA’s percentage of distributions made in error. Specifically, we analyzed FEMA’s IHP Recoupment Processing Executive Summary for fiscal years 2015 through 2019 and concluded that, for these fiscal years, FEMA’s percentage of distributions identified for recoupment was, on average, less than 1 percent — well below the DRRA’s 4 percent threshold.