Federal Reports

We determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not ensure state and local law enforcement agencies expended FEMA’s grant for protection of the President’s non-governmental residences in accordance with Federal regulations and Agency guidelines. Specifically, FEMA’s Grant Programs Directorate (GPD) reimbursed the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for unallowable overtime fringe benefits. Additionally, GPD did not provide effective oversight to manage the PRPA grant during its application review and verification process by assigning limited, inexperienced staff whose work received minimal supervisory review. We made four recommendations to FEMA that should improve the management of the program. FEMA concurred with three recommendations and nonconcurred with one recommendation.

This report provides a summary of our previous findings and recommendations, which may inform future disaster response efforts. Based on our prior work, we identified a pattern of internal control vulnerabilities that negatively affect both disaster survivors and disaster program effectiveness that may hinder future response efforts, including shortcomings in acquisition and contracting controls, interagency coordination challenges, and insufficient privacy safeguards that affect disaster survivors. Additionally, FEMA did not adequately oversee disaster grant recipients and subrecipients, manage disaster assistance funds, or oversee its information technology environment. This report discusses these vulnerabilities and the correlating recommendations we previously made that, if implemented, would better prepare FEMA to respond to future disasters. We made no new recommendations.

The objectives of our inspection were to determine (1) the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) process for assessing the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and School’s (ACICS) compliance with Federal regulatory criteria for recognition, and (2) what evidence the Department considered in its review of selected recognition criteria and whether the Department’s conclusions were supported by evidence.We determined that the Department’s process for assessing ACICS’ compliance with Federal regulatory criteria for recognition followed applicable policies and regulations except during the 2016 recognition review. We determined that the Department did not comply with all regulatory requirements during its 2016 review of ACICS’ petition for recognition renewal because its process did not consider all available relevant information during its review as required.We determined that the Department implemented a process for assessing ACICS’ compliance with recognition criteria following a court remand in 2018 that was permitted under applicable policies and regulations as well as the court’s remand order.We determined that the conclusions of the SDO (DeVos) in the 2018 review regarding ACICS’ compliance with each of the six recognition criteria we reviewed were supported by the evidence cited.However, we found that the Office of Postsecondary Education’s (OPE) “Guidelines for Preparing and Reviewing Petitions and Compliance Reports” (Guidelines) allowed for areas of reviewer subjectivity.

In 2019, a confidential complainant alleged that employees of the contractor Signature Performance incorrectly processed claims for non VA care. The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted this audit to determine whether contractor employees accurately processed these claims.

Business Reply Mail (BRM) is a service offered by the Postal Service that enables a sender to provide a recipient with a convenient, prepaid method for replying to a mailing. Customers request refunds when postage has been applied to the prepaid mailing. To obtain a refund, customers must submit postage affixed BRM, and the required Postal Service (PS) Form 3533, Application for Refund of Fees, Products and Withdrawal of Customer Accounts. The Postal Service assesses fees to process the refunds and deducts them from the customer’s refund amount. OIG data analytics identified Hagerstown, MD, Post Office permit postage refunds totaling about $31,754 for fiscal year (FY) 2020, which is 51 percent of the district’s total. In addition, we identified several months with little or no refund activity. The objective of this audit was to determine whether postage affixed BRM refunds were properly issued, supported, and processed at the Hagerstown, MD, Post Office.