Federal Reports

This investigation addressed an allegation that a contract employee and his employer submitted mileage reimbursement expenses in the amount of $23,431.82 that were not allowed under their contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). These travel expenses were submitted for the employee’s travel to and from TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Site between February 2017 and April 2019. The evidence substantiated that these expenses were not reimbursable under the contract.The OIG recommends that (1) TVA re-educate the contractor on when mileage reimbursement is permitted under the contract, and (2) resolve the misinterpretation of the contract terminology pertaining to mileage reimbursement between the Nuclear Projects and Supply Chain groups.

The Office of Inspector General's annual plan revision outlines changes to our FY 2020 Annual Plan due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field operations (OFO) personnel at ports of entry had separated 60 asylum-seeking families between May 6 and July 9, 2018, despite CBP’s claim that it had separated only 7 such families. More than half of those separations were based solely on the asylum-seeking parents’ prior non-violent immigration violations, which appeared to be inconsistent with official DHS public messaging. After a June 27, 2018 court ruling, CBP issued specific guidance, and the ports separated fewer families in the prior months. Despite the new guidance, we continue to have concerns about DHS’ ability to accurately identify and address all family separations due to data reliability issues. In late June 2018, CBP modified its system for tracking aliens at the ports of entry to capture family separation data consistently, but it could not provide a reliable number of families separated before June 2018. We made one recommendation that will help CBP’s data collection. CBP concurred with our recommendation