Federal Reports

In 2019, Congress enacted the Payment Integrity Information Act (PIIA) to update required reporting on agencies’ improper payments. PIIA requires agencies to review and identify programs and activities that may be susceptible to significant improper payments, estimate the improper payments rates in agency programs, and report on their actions to reduce and recover those payments. The Inspector General of each agency assesses compliance with these requirements annually.AmeriCorps implemented corrective actions in FY 2021 that improved its compliance with PIIA reporting requirements. The agency now meets eight of the 10 PIIA compliance requirements. Of the two remaining requirements, the agency reported improper payment rates above the ten percent compliance threshold for the AmeriCorps State and National Program , Foster Grandparent Program , Senior Companion Program , and Retired and Senior Volunteer Program and reported improper payment rates that were not accurate, reliable, or consistent with Office of Management and Budget guidance.AmeriCorps attributes the improper payment rates to the operational challenges that grantees continued to face related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including how to administer, and document that they appropriately administered, the temporary pay allowances that AmeriCorps allowed during the period reviewed. Additionally, AmeriCorps management does not have adequate controls over the supervision and oversight of sample selection and statistical projection procedures regarding its improper payment testing. AmeriCorps generally concurred with and agreed to implement our recommendations to (1) add additional provisions to its grant terms and conditions, (2) strengthen supervision and oversight of sample selections and statistical projection procedures to ensure that it appropriately projects estimated improper payment rates, and (3) develop and implement actions to reduce the improper payment rates below ten percent for FY 2022. AmeriCorps Management’s Response can be found in Appendix C of the report.

This report presents a summary of the results of our self-initiated audits assessing mail delivery, customer service, and property conditions at three select delivery units in the San Diego, CA, region (Project Number 22-077). These delivery units included the San Diego Downtown and Linda Vista stations in San Diego, CA; and the Ramona Main Post Office (MPO) in Ramona, CA. We issued interim reports to district management for each of these delivery units regarding the conditions we identified. In addition, we issued a report on the efficiency of operations at the Margaret L. Sellers Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC), which services these three delivery units.

DFC OIG Spring FY 2022 Semi Annual Report to Congress for the reporting period October 1, 2021 - March 31, 2022

Our objective was to evaluate how DHS determined employee status for placement into vaccine distribution priority groups; determine how DHS, in conjunction with VHA, planned to triage and distribute available vaccine inventory and vaccinate frontline, mission-critical DHS staff; and evaluate how DHS executed its plan.

Several challenges limited our ability to fulfill by audit the mandate in Section 1216 of the DRRA. For instance, FEMA’s data system does not capture Individuals and Households Program (IHP) assistance data in a manner that allows us to accurately calculate a percentage of distributions made in error in any 12-month period. In addition, the amount of data required to conduct the audit represents millions of rows of data, as well as underlying supporting documents. These efforts require considerable resources for FEMA to provide, and the Office of Inspector General to review, the IHP information. Facing these limitations, we adopted an alternate approach to estimate FEMA’s percentage of distributions made in error. Specifically, we analyzed FEMA’s IHP Recoupment Processing Executive Summary for fiscal years 2015 through 2019 and concluded that, for these fiscal years, FEMA’s percentage of distributions identified for recoupment was, on average, less than 1 percent — well below the DRRA’s 4 percent threshold.

Objective: To determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) had adequate controls over mail processing during the COVID-19 pandemic.