Federal Reports

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) did not adjudicate affirmative asylum applications in a timely manner to meet statutory timelines and to reduce its existing backlog. At the end of fiscal year 2023, USCIS had more than 1 million asylum cases pending determination. Of those, USCIS had more than 786,000 affirmative asylum cases pending determination for a period longer than 180 days from the date of filing. This occurred because USCIS did not have sufficient funding, staffing, and planning to complete its affirmative asylum caseload. USCIS received limited appropriated funding and primarily relied on application fees. However, in 2023, USCIS determined that its fee-funded revenue was not sufficient to support staffing needed to fully execute adjudication and naturalization services. This shortage forced USCIS to prioritize certain types of work over resolving its backlog of affirmative asylum cases and also resulted in USCIS setting performance goals at levels too low to timely adjudicate new claims within the statutory limits and address the existing affirmative asylum backlog.

What We Looked At The Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST) provides technical and administrative services, including information technology (IT) services, to DOT components through the Working Capital Fund (WCF). The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and the Office of Financial Management (OFM) administer the WCF, which is designed to be self-sustaining and to achieve full cost recovery. Our prior audit work identified inconsistencies in OCIO’s WCF billing procedures. Given those findings and that DOT’s fiscal year 2023 budget estimates represented significant estimated expenditures—$271.4 million for IT services—we initiated this audit. Our objective was to assess whether OCIO’s WCF billing-rate methodologies for IT services achieve cost recovery, to include evaluating how OFM determines the operating and capital reserves and assesses whether excess funds or advances exist in the WCF. What We Found DOT lacks effective controls and processes to determine whether its WCF billing-rate methodologies achieve cost recovery for IT services. Specifically, OCIO could not provide sufficient documentation for the billing rates to validate 26 of the 36 transactions in our sample. Without adequate documentation, we cannot confirm if OCIO’s rates recover the costs to provide these services, totaling over $194 million. We also identified internal control weaknesses that hinder OCIO’s ability to confirm cost recovery, including inadequate oversight to validate charges, inaccurate accounting of IT services, and noncompliant agreements between OCIO and WCF customers. OFM also lacks written policies and procedures to demonstrate how it governs reserves, identifies surplus advances and excess funds, and evaluates if the WCF is breaking even. As a result, we cannot determine if the WCF is appropriately managed or achieves cost recovery.  Our Recommendations We made nine recommendations to improve the WCF’s ability to achieve cost recovery for IT services. OST concurs with recommendation 1–3, 6, and 8–9, which we consider resolved but open pending completion of planned actions. OST partially concurs with recommendations 4 and 5, and non-concurs with recommendation 7. We consider 4 and 7 open and unresolved and 5 resolved and closed.

Navanjun Grewal, a doctor based in Los Angeles, California, was sentenced on July 2, 2024, in U.S. District Court, Central District of California, for making a false statement and for obstructing a federal audit related to a health care fraud investigation. Grewal was sentenced to two years’ probation and was ordered to pay $300,000 in restitution.Our investigation found that Grewal knowingly and willfully submitted a fraudulent document to the Department of Defense in response to an audit request regarding prescriptions for compounded medications that had been submitted to TRICARE for reimbursement. Grewal created and submitted fraudulent patient files in response to the audit. Grewal was part of a large health care fraud scheme in which beneficiaries were solicited to provide their insurance information to a pharmacist for medication they did not seek or need. As a result of the scheme, Amtrak’s heath care plan was billed $32,489 of which $26,962 was paid, and Tricare, the U.S. military’s health care plan, paid $12,264,685 on the fraudulently submitted claims.

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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) contracted with Crowe LLP under contract/order number 31310023A0002 to conduct an identification and assessment of risks related to the oversight performed by the NRC on the decommissioning trust funds (DTF) used by licensees during the decommissioning of nuclear reactor sites. The project’s scope was to conduct a qualitative and quantitative risk assessment of the areas identified in collaboration with the OIG and other stakeholders.The focus of our review was on the decommissioning process and trust funds related to nuclear power reactor sites. As of September 5, 2023, the NRC had responsibility for twenty-three (23) power reactor sites that were either currently undergoing decommissioning or had permanently ceased operations. The scope of our analysis was the risks associated with the DTF expenses and the specific areas for which the NRC OIG has oversight.