U.S. Department of Education’s Compliance with Payment Integrity Information Reporting Requirements for Fiscal Year 2022

The objective of this statutory audit was to determine whether the Department complied with the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 (PIIA) for FY 2022. We found that the Department did not comply with the PIIA because it did not meet one of the six compliance requirements. Specifically, the Department reported improper payment and unknown payment estimates for the Title I, Special Education, and Education Stabilization Fund programs that exceeded 10 percent. We also determined that the Department’s improper payment and unknown payment estimates for five programs (Title I, Special Education, Education Stabilization Fund, Pell, and Direct Loan) were not reliable. Specifically, for the Title I and Special Education programs, the improper payment and unknown payment estimates were based on inaccurate sampling populations. For the Title I, Special Education, and Education Stabilization Fund programs, the Department’s testing results were inaccurate; and the improper payment sampling and estimation plan for the Pell and Direct Loan programs included nonrandom student-level sampling from some of the compliance audits FSA used to calculate the estimates, which affected the appropriateness of the confidence intervals used in the calculation of the improper payment and unknown payment estimates.