What We Looked At
The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) advises the President on drug control issues and is responsible for developing and implementing the National Drug Control Strategy (the Strategy), a comprehensive plan with long-range goals for reducing drug abuse and its consequences in the United States. To carry out the Strategy's goals, ONDCP works with more than a dozen Federal agencies-including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)-through the National Drug Control Program (NDCP). We most recently reviewed NHTSA's NDCP activities for fiscal year 2019, identifying errors and omissions in the Agency's reports. Given the length of time since our last review and issues it identified, we self-initiated this performance audit. Our objective was to assess NHTSA's internal controls over its NDCP activity. Specifically, we looked at NHTSA's (1) controls for tracking drug control obligations and consistently reporting to ONDCP and (2) documentation to show compliance with drug control budget formulation requirements.
What We Found
NHTSA lacks controls for tracking and consistently reporting drug control-related obligations as required. Instead, the Agency relies on the expertise of its staff to estimate drug control-related obligations; however, staff used varying methodologies when contracts addressed multiple areas and inconsistently reported contract obligation amounts. As a result, ONDCP cannot rely on the accuracy of NHTSA's reported drug control-related obligations, inhibiting ONDCP's ability to accurately inform Congress and the public about the funds NHTSA spent on drug control activities. In addition, NHTSA lacks documentation to show it complies with drug control budget formulation requirements. NHTSA does not have formal written approval for its methodology from ONDCP and could not provide documentation to support how it calculated the budget estimates reported to ONDCP. As a result, NHTSA cannot ensure its budget estimates reasonably and fairly quantify funding that the Agency will use for drug control activities.
Our Recommendations
We made four recommendations to improve NHTSA's internal controls of drug control-related reporting. The Agency concurred with all four of our recommendations. We consider recommendations 1, 2, and 4 resolved but open pending completion of the planned actions and recommendation 3 resolved and closed.
