Federal Reports

On March 27, 2020, the President signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which provided the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) with $756 million to support the needs of DOI programs, bureaus, Indian Country, and the Insular Areas.As part of the $756 million, the Office of the Secretary received $157.4 million to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the coronavirus across DOI operations, which includes wildland fire management. The DOI approved $11.3 million in funding for the DOI’s Wildland Fire Management (WFM) program through September 30, 2020.The DOI’s WFM program is composed of the four bureaus with wildland fire management responsibilities—the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the National Park Service (NPS), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)—and the Office of Wildland Fire (OWF), which is responsible for program coordination, accountability, and oversight of the WFM program budget. The OWF coordinated a fire management request for CARES Act funding on behalf of the WFM program. The OWF request provided estimates of items needed upfront, as well as items needed on an ongoing basis through the end of the fiscal year. As of June 19, 2020, the DOI had approved $11.3 million, and the WFM program had obligated $547,596 (or 5 percent) and spent $381,431 (or 3 percent) of those approved funds. The CARES Act requires agencies to obligate all appropriations by September 30, 2021.

In efforts to provide FEC management insight into the TRANServe program’s internal controls and operations, the OIG sought answers to the following questions: Did FEC employees misuse their TRANServe benefits during the FY 19 shutdown?Has management established adequate internal controls to monitor compliance with FEC Commission Directive 54, Employee Transit Benefit Program?As a result, we developed three recommendations to improve the operations and monitoring of the FEC TRANServe Program. These recommendations serve to enhance the integrity and effectiveness of the FEC TRANServe Program and the accuracy of the agency transit subsidy allocations.

We contracted with RMA Associates, LLC, an independent certified public accounting firm, to conduct the FY 2019 improper payments risk assessment for the National Endowment for the Arts (Arts Endowment) in compliance with the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act (IPERA). IPERA defines significant as improper payments that exceed $10 million and 2.5 percent of the program’s total expenditures or $100 million regardless of the proportion to the program’s total expenditures. RMA performed a risk assessment to determine if the Arts Endowment’s grants program is susceptible to improper payments. In performing the assessment, RMA only assessed inherent risk. Based on the assessment of inherent risk, four potential areas of risk were identified: $7.3 million were sourced from manual invoice entries; $4.3 million payments were held; $74.4 million transactions were created by one user; and $5.3 million of vendor payments were flagged as suspicions payments.

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