Federal Reports

The VA OIG assessed the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System’s oversight and stewardship of funds for fiscal year 2019 and identified opportunities to improve cost efficiency.The review focused on four areas:I. Use of the Medical/Surgical Prime Vendor Next Generation program. VA maintains contracts with vendors to streamline medical supply purchasing and distribution. Because its prime vendor did not fill orders consistently, the system bought only about 75 percent of its supplies through the program, falling short of VA’s recommended 90 percent goal. The system also did not always monitor the prime vendor’s performance or report performance problems to VA.II. Purchase card use. The team sampled 102 purchase card transactions and determined the system could instead have pursued contracts for 19 of them. Quarterly internal audits were also not completed on time, and approving officials did not adequately monitor cardholder purchases. In addition, the team identified 16 purchases that were split into smaller transactions to circumvent purchase limits, resulting in improper payments of about $140,016.III. Administrative staffing levels and accuracy of labor costs. The system used 251.6 more administrative full-time equivalents than other systems of similar size and complexity. The system’s director said this was partly due to initial staffing costs associated with a new medical center. The system has, however, implemented strategies to improve staffing efficiency and management.IV. Pharmacy operations and cost avoidance efforts. The system spent approximately $9 million more on prescription drugs than similar systems did. This was partly due to inaccurate or outdated prices in the system’s list of drugs and to low annual turnover of its drug supplies, but the system has made progress in improving efficiency and cost-saving efforts.The OIG made six recommendations to the healthcare system director to address the issues identified in this review.

We found several areas of the privacy program to be generally effective, including (1) completion of privacy impact assessments, (2) privacy related training taken by network users, (3) privacy considerations during the authority to operate process, (4) system categorization, (5) privacy incident response, (6) privacy-related contract terms and conditions, and (7) desktop and laptop sanitization. However, we identified seven issues that should be addressed by TVA management to further increase the effectiveness of the privacy program. Specifically, we found:1. Unsecured electronic restricted personally identifiable information on SharePoint and shared network drives. 2. Unsecured hard copy restricted personally identifiable information.3. No end user notifications for e-mail security violations.4. No technical controls for removable media.5. We could not confirm that all desktops and laptops utilize encryption.6. Privacy Act notices on TVA forms did not include all required elements.7. Not all external Web sites included privacy policies. (Note: Prior to completion of our audit, TVA Technology and Innovation took action to address the external Web sites that were missing required privacy policies.)We also found gaps between TVA’s policies and procedures and applicable federal privacy regulations and guidance.

This report presents the results of the System and Organization Controls 1 Type 2 examination conducted in accordance with Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 18 for the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Finance Center (NFC) description of its payroll and personnel systems used to process user entities payroll and human resource transactions throughout the period October 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021.

This report presents the results of the System and Organization Controls 1 Type 2 examination conducted in accordance with Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 18 for the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Finance Center (NFC) description of its payroll and personnel systems used to process user entities payroll and human resource transactions throughout the period October 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021.

Our objective was to assess the U.S. Postal Service’s service performance for all mail classes over an 18-month period and determine the most common failure points in the mail flow process.Mail is divided into different categories called “classes,” each having different features, service levels, and postage rates. The Postal Service has service standards for delivering mail in each class after receiving it from the customer. The delivered mail is measured against the service standards and the service performance targets for each mail class to determine the percentage of mail delivered on time.We analyzed service performance for Priority, First-Class, Periodicals, Marketing, and Bound Printed Matter mail classes. We also reviewed data to identify where in the mail flow process service failures occurred.

We focused on the Trusted Traveler Programs (TTP) membership revocations of three U.S. citizens associated with the migrant caravan and whether CBP revoked the TTP memberships in retaliation for the individuals’ support of the migrant caravan. We also addressed systemic issues related to TTP revocations that we identified while reviewing those three revocations. We found that CBP revoked three U.S. citizens’ TTP memberships after discovering links to information that it considered derogatory and a potential security risk. In two of the revocations, CBP did not assess the quality or accuracy of the potentially derogatory information at any step of the process. Specifically, we determined that CBP officers did not evaluate unsubstantiated information, and made unsupported conclusions and placed lookouts in TECS on these two individuals. Further, because of CBP’s policy to revoke memberships based on positive matches to TECS records, CBP revoked these two memberships without evaluating the underlying information. We made two recommendations to ensure two TTP membership revocations were based on quality and accurate information and to issue guidance to personnel about TTP revocation standards.

The evidence did not support a finding of retaliation because the letter issued by the senior official was not considered a personnel action.