Our objective was to assess the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA’s) spending of grant program administrative funds authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
We found that NTIA initially did not maintain a consolidated 10-year spend plan for cost-category allocation under the IIJA program. NTIA manages cost-category allocations annually pursuant to the apportionment process required by the Office of Management and Budget. Although this initially posed a risk to long-term cost tracking, NTIA's decision to use annual plans has allowed it to be more responsive to the changing fiscal needs of the $48.2 billion broadband portfolio, mitigating this concern.
Ten of the transactions we tested, valued at about $324,000, lacked detailed information to link costs to their respective grants. Because NTIA has successfully realigned its administrative framework within the 2.7 percent aggregate cap permitted by law and received congressional approval to manage funds across the portfolio, the inability to trace these transactions to individual grant accounts does not represent a material risk of statutory noncompliance. However, establishing internal controls for the planning and tracking of expenses is considered a best practice to ensure continued statutory compliance in the future.
We made one recommendation to NTIA that it consider implementing controls to plan for and track expenses by each broadband program’s life cycle. NTIA concurred with our recommendation and is working to implement it.
