The U.S. Department of the Interior Needs to Strengthen Charge Card Internal Controls When Using Disaster Relief Funds

We conducted this audit to determine whether the DOI and its bureaus included the required documentation for charge card transactions, properly used fiscal year (FY) 2019 disaster relief funds, and properly allocated FY 2019 disaster relief funds when using U.S. Government charge cards.We found that the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), National Park Service (NPS), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) had incidents of missing or insufficient documentation to support purchases. We also found the FWS, NPS, and USGS used FY 2019 disaster relief funds to purchase items that were not associated with the allowable uses Congress identified. We question $83,165 in costs allocated to the FY 2019 disaster relief funds. We note that the bureaus properly allocated most FY 2019 Government charge card purchases using disaster relief funds. We also identified two other matters related to charge card use in emergency situations and disaster relief expense reallocations.We make eight recommendations to help the DOI and its bureaus resolve questioned costs and strengthen internal controls over disaster relief funds and the Government charge card program. Based on the DOI’s response to our draft report, we consider four recommendations to be resolved and implemented, three recommendations to be resolved but not implemented, and one recommendation to be unresolved. We will refer four recommendations to the Office of Policy, Management and Budget for resolution and implementation tracking.