Federal Reports

We conducted an audit on the effectiveness of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program’s Life Expectancy Set Asides (LESA).  The LESA is a set aside portion of the HECM mortgage that makes property tax, hazard insurance, and flood insurance payments on behalf of certain financially vulnerable borrowers.  While not guaranteed, the LESA funds are intended to last for the full duration of the borrower’s life expectancy.  We initiated this audit because of recent federal reporting on rising nationwide property tax and hazard insurance costs, paid for by LESA funds.  Our audit objective was to determine whether LESAs were meeting the intent of the program for financially vulnerable borrowers.

We found an estimated 1,237 HECM borrowers will need to begin making property charge payments out of pocket because their LESAs will deplete in significantly less time than HUD estimated they would last. This occurred because HUD did not evaluate whether LESA calculations were effective or whether LESAs would be available for the borrowers’ estimated life expectancy.  If borrowers cannot make these property charge payments out of pocket, their HECM loans would default, resulting in a projected loss of $258 million to HUD.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Office of Inspector General retained Williams, Adley & Co.-DC LLP, an independent public accounting firm, to perform an audit of the CPSC’s Zero Trust implementation.  Overall, the audit confirmed the CPSC’s current Zero Trust trajectory is aligned with federal cybersecurity modernization objectives and supports the continued development of a more secure and resilient information security environment.  

The 2026-2030 strategic plan outlines the vision and priorities that guide EAC OIG as it carries out its mission.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) administers and enforces U.S. export regulations to control the export of goods and technologies for national security and foreign policy purposes. Our objective for this audit was to assess the effectiveness of BIS actions to detect violations of export controls for Russia and Belarus in fiscal years 2022 and 2023.

BIS prevents the diversion or misuse of export-controlled items abroad by conducting pre-license checks and post-shipment verifications—collectively known as end-use checks—on foreign end users for individual export transactions, to help ensure that U.S. exports are being used as intended and to assess the legitimacy of end users.

Overall, we found that BIS needs to strengthen its end-use check process to prevent restricted shipments to Russia and Belarus. Specifically, we found weaknesses in BIS methods to identify and select high-risk shipments for end-use checks; document results and assign final ratings of compliance with export control regulations; and complete enforcement actions to hold potential violators of export controls accountable. These weaknesses undermine the transparency and accountability of BIS’s regulatory oversight and underscore the need for improvements to strengthen and modernize the end-use check process.

We made six recommendations to strengthen and modernize the end-use check process.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements.