Federal Reports

In two of the four areas – training and collaboration – Washington’s Emergency Management Division (EMD) and FEMA complied with applicable policies, procedures, and regulations.  In the third functional area – project execution, monitoring and oversight – we did not identify any significant deficiencies.  We found, however, EMD lacked position-specific guidance for all personnel with programmatic responsibilities.  In the last functional area – project and grant closeout – neither EMD nor its subrecipients submitted timely project closeout requests.  In addition, FEMA did not enforce compliance with its own guidance for processing closeouts.  We recommended FEMA ensure EMD complies with its State Administrative Plan by issuing and regularly updating desk manuals.  In addition, we recommended FEMA coordinate with EMD to initiate closeout on behalf of subrecipients for all open, large projects whose period of performance end dates exceed the 90-day regulatory requirement, and submit closeout requests to FEMA for projects exceeding the 180-day requirement.  We made five recommendations to strengthen EMD’s internal controls to improve its oversight of FEMA’s Public Assistance grant program.  FEMA concurred with all five of our recommendations. 

Seek link below for the full report, report summary, multimedia or any agency follow-up.

This report presents the results of our self-initiated audit of package delivery scanning issues at Gardena Post Office, Gardena, CA. The Gardena Post Office is in the Los Angeles District of the Pacific Area. This audit was designed to provide U.S. Postal Service management with timely information on potential delivery scanning risks at the Gardena Post Office. The Gardena Post Office has 56 city delivery routes and one combination route delivered by 91 city carriers. We used geolocation data to identify units with stop-the-clock (STC) scans that occurred at the delivery unit property instead of the intended delivery address. The unit had 29,602 STC scans at the delivery unit between April and June 2019. These scans occurred on multiple routes and were intended for multiple delivery addresses throughout the timeframe.

The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) reviewed four allegations originating from an October 2017 hotline complaint about potential mismanagement of several construction projects at the Ralph H. Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The OIG substantiated two of the allegations—that construction for some nonrecurring maintenance projects took years to begin after contract awards, resulting in increased project costs of at least $441,000, and that engineering service staff had planned to spend about $74,000 to create separate drawings from a single rendering completed for a project. Regarding the first allegation, the OIG reviewed four construction projects—the specialty clinic renovation, the gastrointestinal clinic refurbishment, the emergency department expansion, and an upgrade for the induction unit system for the 5B South Ward area. Construction for these projects started an average of 743 days after the contracts had been awarded. The OIG recommended the medical center director ensure a process is established to inform the Veterans Integrated Service Network 7 capital asset manager in advance if construction is not planned to start within 150 days after contract awards. The process will make certain that prudent decisions can be made regarding project funds in a timely manner. The project related to the second allegation was initially planned as a single multiphase project but was subsequently separated into two. However, because the original drawing was never split and used for both projects, which would have improperly increased rendering costs, the OIG did not make any recommendations. The OIG did not substantiate other allegations that construction items were inappropriately removed from the solicitation on the intensive care unit project to reduce the contract price, or that a construction project was inappropriately classified.