Federal Reports

Why We Did This Report

The Pesticide Registration Improvement Act of 2003 requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General to perform an annual audit of the financial statements for the Pesticide Registration Fund.
 

Summary of Findings

We rendered an unmodified opinion on the EPA’s fiscal years 2024 and 2023 Pesticide Registration Fund, also known as the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act Fund, financial statements. This means that the statements were fairly presented and free of material misstatement.

Our Objective(s)To assess FAA's oversight of United Airlines' maintenance practices. Specifically, we evaluated FAA's actions to address maintenance non-compliances and violations at the air carrier.
Why This AuditUnited Airlines is one of the world's largest commercial air carriers, carrying over 160million passengers annually. Several incidents, including in-flight engine shutdowns and emergency landings, have raised concerns about FAA's oversight of United's maintenance practices. Given these issues, we initiated this audit as part of a continuing series of audits related to FAA's oversight of maintenance and compliance issues in the airline industry.
What We FoundFAA's under-resourced inspections, low Certificate Management Office (CMO)inspector staffing levels, and ineffective workforce planning are insufficient to oversee safety risks.

When the CMO may not be able to conduct inspections onsite due to a lack of resources-such as insufficient staffing numbers or the ability to travel to the inspection site-FAA is conducting inspections virtually and not postponing the inspections in accordance with FAA requirements, which adversely impacts its risk quantification models.
The CMO does not have enough inspectors, which increases workload and staff turnover while reducing FAA's capabilities to inspect United's growing fleet of aircraft.
Continued CMO inspector vacancies have contributed to a loss of institutional knowledge within FAA's United CMO as well as prevented the CMO from completing all its required inspections.

FAA has not addressed all prior safety management system (SMS) oversight recommendations or ensured access to air carrier SMS data.

Five of the recommendations we have made to improve the CMO's oversight of SMS since 2019 remain open.
FAA has not effectively educated inspectors on how to access, obtain, and manage an air carrier's SMS data, which prevents inspectors from adequately assessing an air carrier's SMS and determining root causes of maintenance problems.

RecommendationsWe made 6 recommendations to improve FAA oversight of United's maintenance practices.

This statutory report presents the activities and accomplishments of the OIG from April 1, 2025, through September 30, 2025. The audits, investigations, and related work highlighted in the report are products of our mission to identify and stop fraud, waste, and abuse; and promote accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness through our oversight of the Department’s programs and operations.