Federal Reports

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This report recaps OIG achievements in 2021, in core mission as well as organizational improvements.

The Office of the Inspector General included an audit of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) maintenance of its owned gas pipelines in our annual audit plan due to pipeline issues identified at other utilities and potential risks to TVA. Our audit objective was to determine if TVA’s maintenance of its owned gas pipelines is adequate. We found TVA did not provide sufficient oversight of the two Contract Operations Providers and the Contract Engineering Provider. We found the lack of oversight resulted in inadequate maintenance in some areas and inconsistencies in reporting that hindered TVA’s ability to track and correct the identified deficiencies. In addition, we found TVA’s Gas Transmission Pipelines Policy (TVA Power Operations Standard Programs and Processes 09.120, Natural Gas Transmission Pipeline Operations) in place between July 2016 and October 2020 was limited and outdated on contractor oversight.

We audited the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) oversight of its public housing agencies’ (PHA) reasonable accommodation policies and procedures. We initiated this audit because we identified an increase in housing discrimination complaints based on a failure to provide a reasonable accommodation, even as the total number of all housing discrimination complaints was decreasing. Our audit objective was to determine whether HUD had adequate policies and procedures for ensuring that PHAs properly addressed, assessed, and fulfilled requests for reasonable accommodation, including COVID-19 related requests. HUD did not have adequate policies and procedures for ensuring that PHAs properly addressed, assessed, and fulfilled requests for reasonable accommodation. HUD also did not perform civil rights front-end reviews as required. These conditions occurred because HUD (1) did not include in its compliance monitoring guidance a requirement for personnel to review PHAs reasonable accommodation policies and procedures, (2) had not updated its guidance to ensure that it was centralized, and (3) did not believe it was responsible for conducting civil rights front-end reviews. As a result, PHAs did not receive consistent oversight in this area nationwide and may not be properly implementing existing requirements or not understand all their responsibilities related to requests for reasonable accommodation. Also, HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) did not have the benefit of the information the reviews would have collected and HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) could not use the information to address issues that may have been identified or to pursue any corrective action. We recommend that HUD’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Housing and Voucher Programs (1) update its compliance monitoring guidance to include a requirement for personnel to review PHAs reasonable accommodations policies and procedures (2) update and consolidate its reasonable accommodation policies and procedures to ensure that there is centralized guidance available for the field offices and PHAs; (3) conduct additional outreach efforts to educate tenants and PHAs on their rights and responsibilities related to requests for reasonable accommodation; (4) require that PHAs track requests for reasonable accommodation, including the date of the request, the type of request, and the disposition and date of any action taken that should be made available to HUD at its request; (5) review the joint agreement with HUD FHEO, and related Section 504 checklist, and modify, update, or recommit to it to ensure that the roles and responsibilities of the Office of Public and Indian Housing for conducting civil rights front-end reviews is clearly defined; and (6) ensure that personnel receive training on how to conduct the civil rights front-end reviews, including a review of PHAs reasonable accommodation policies and procedures.

Our objective for this report was to assess the extent to which the company has a program management framework to govern how it will complete its current and future work across the Gateway projects.While the company has started hiring staff and building a schedule, among other things, to manage the volume of work it will soon encounter on Gateway, we found that the company has not fully developed a thorough program management framework that describes the processes its departments will follow and the tools they will use to manage the program now and in the years ahead. The company is facing three challenges on Gateway without this framework. First, although Amtrak has recently added staff to the Gateway program team, it has been overtasked because the company has not assessed the resources that the team and departments providing major support to Gateway need to manage current and future work. Second, while the company has some mechanisms in place to update certain key stakeholders, it has not determined how it will collect and provide comprehensive and consolidated information on the program’s overall status—including budget and schedule—to all internal company stakeholders with responsibilities for Gateway. Third, although the company has assessed risks to individual projects in coordination with its partners, it has not assessed the broader program-wide risks it may face managing its Gateway commitments, such as potential impacts to other company acquisitions or projects. To build a thorough program management framework for Gateway, we recommended that the company (1) build out its program management plan, (2) assess its current and future resource needs, (3) implement communication protocols to manage how it will generate, collect and distribute program information to internal company stakeholders, and (4) develop a process to identify and mitigate its program risks.