Federal Reports

Our objective for this report was to assess the extent to which the company’s systems are interoperable with its hosts and tenants, and the company is ensuring that its systems are on and continuously operating.Amtrak expects its Positive Train Control (PTC) systems to operate with other railroads where the company runs on their tracks or it allows them to use the company’s tracks. Effective program management has helped the company achieve this progress. Amtrak, however, can take steps to better ensure its systems are on, operating continuously, are reliable, and are using accurate data to guide their operations. We found that Amtrak cannot fully measure PTC reliability because it does not have the electronic tools to easily access the data necessary for it and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to monitor system performance. As a result, reports on PTC reliability are incomplete and Amtrak cannot easily identify potential problems it may need to address promptly or longer-term. The company also faces two risks that may diminish the safety benefits PTC is intended to provide. First, the systems sometimes do not initialize before a train leaves a station or may disengage along a route. Program officials pointed out that, when such incidents occur, trains must still abide by traditional measures to ensure safe operations, such as obeying signaling systems and rules that guide engineers. The FRA will require stringent practices to address these situations be implemented by January 2022.Second, the systems require accurate data to know when to enforce temporary speed restrictions or prohibit trains from entering areas where employees are working, but dispatchers must manually enter these data into the systems. The company takes steps to help ensure the data dispatchers enter are accurate, but there is still a risk of human error.To address the findings, we recommended that the company research options for electronic tools to access data needed to monitor PTC performance and submit what it selects for funding consideration. In addition, we recommended that Amtrak determine what, if any, additional mitigations are needed when PTC does not operate as intended and initiate its plan to assess the risk of incorrect data entry.

Semiannual Report to Congress April 1, 2020 –September 30, 2020

In accordance with our annual plan, the United States Capitol Police (USCP or the Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted an audit of the Department’s financial statements for the years ended September 30, 2020 and 2019. Our objective was to express an opinion on the fairness of the financial statements in all material respects and render an opinion on controls over financial reporting and report on compliance with laws, regulations, and contracts. Our audit was conducted in accordance with Government Auditing Standards.

In planning and performing our audit of the financial statements of the United States Capitol Police (USCP or the Department) as of and for the year ended September 30, 2020, in accordance with auditing standards generally accepted in the United States of America, we considered USCP's internal control over financial reporting as a basis for designing audit procedures that are appropriate in the circumstances for the purpose of expressing our opinions on the financial statements and on internal control over financial reporting.

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Generation Projects and Fleet Services organization supports the execution of TVA’s strategic asset plan and outage plans through projects and services, including capital projects for the Power Operations (PO) organization to support equipment reliability at TVA’s coal, gas, and hydro plants. Due to the importance of effective project management to TVA’s mission and potential issues identified during Organizational Effectiveness evaluations, we performed an evaluation of project turnover to PO. The objective of our evaluation was to determine if TVA is effectively managing the turnover of projects to PO. The scope of our evaluation included capital projects for PO’s generation assets managed by the Generation Projects group. We limited our evaluation to the implementation and closure activities related to the turnover of those projects to PO. We determined TVA is not effectively managing the turnover of projects to PO because the project turnover processes were not aligned and the inconsistencies led to project issues related to (1) turnover and customer acceptance, (2) completion of the design change notice, and (3) project closure. In addition, we identified opportunities for improvement related to (1) time frames for completion of the design change notice process and (2) project ownership.