Federal Reports

This Office of Inspector General (OIG) Comprehensive Healthcare Inspection Program report describes the results of a focused evaluation of the care provided at the Comprehensive Healthcare Inspection of the James E. Van Zandt VA Medical Center in Altoona, Pennsylvania. This evaluation focused on five key operational areas:• Leadership and organizational risks• Quality, safety, and value• Medical staff privileging• Environment of care• Mental health (focusing on suicide prevention initiatives)The OIG issued one recommendation for improvement in the Medical Staff Privileging area of review regarding ensuring practitioners with equivalent specialized training and similar privileges evaluate licensed independent practitioners when completing Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluations.

Top Management Challenges

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program offices issued departmental notices to inform public housing agencies (PHA) and owners of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021’s (the Act) requirements. In addition, HUD program offices planned to use HUD’s revised physical inspection processes to ensure that PHAs and owners complied with the Act, namely under its new National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate (NSPIRE), which incorporate the Act’s requirements into its carbon monoxide standard, to ensure that PHAs and owners complied with the Act. The final NSPIRE rule is effective July 1, 2023, for public housing programs, October 1, 2023, for multifamily housing programs, and October 1, 2024, for the Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS program, Housing Choice Voucher Program, and Project-Based Voucher Program. HUD will need up to 3 years to complete NSPIRE inspections for HUD-assisted properties. However, PHAs and owners will self-inspect all units annually. In addition to previous guidance and training material, HUD provided PHAs with guidance in the Joint Notice PIH [Office of Public and Indian Housing], H [Office of Housing], OLHCHH [Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes] 2022-01 about the Act’s requirements. The notice provided educational material and initial information and guidance for PHAs, owners, and managers to educate residents on health hazards, including carbon monoxide. At the time of our interviews, all 15 PHAs expected to have carbon monoxide detectors installed by the statutory deadline of December 27, 2022. The PHAs identified three barriers to completing the required installations: (1) lack of funding to implement the requirements in the Act, (2) residents’ tampering with carbon monoxide detectors, and (3) procurement processes for carbon monoxide detectors taking longer than expected.

This report presents the results of our inspection to assess the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) controls to prevent disbursements to ineligible entities. Specifically, our review focused on general eligibility requirements applicable to all SVOG applicants and venue-specific requirements applicable to live venue operators.SBA delayed launching the SVOG application portal for over 2 weeks in April 2021 because of technical issues. In June 2021, SBA officials made program changes, which SBA called a “program refresh,” to accelerate application processing and to expedite the release of program funds. SBA stopped using the application portal to track applicant compliance with each eligibility requirement, switching instead to a manual checklist. SBA staff were instructed to presume applicant assertions to be true unless a clear indication of fraud was present. SBA also placed a strict 4-hour review time limit per application. Additionally, SBA limited or eliminated certain verification procedures.We recommended SBA management 1) reevaluate eligibility for the 47 SVOG applicants we reviewed and to recover funds from applicants determined to be ineligible and 2) implement additional controls for the monitoring, auditing, and compliance phases to prevent ineligible entities from receiving grants.