Lack of Defined Processes and Procedures Impede Efforts to Monitor End-Use Check Performance

For our final report on the audit of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) regarding foreign end users and exports, our objective was to assess the effectiveness of BIS’ efforts to ensure foreign end users are suitable to receive and use controlled U.S. exports in accordance with the Export Administration Regulations. As a result of audit planning, we decided to focus on assessing BIS’ plan to target end-use checks (EUCs). Specifically, we sought to identify whether BIS had criteria to target EUCs and assess how well it adhered to them in FYs 2015–2017. We found that BIS (1) is unable to adequately determine whether EUCs met its targeting criteria and (2) did not fully screen export transactions that used the Strategic Trade Authorization license exception.