Federal Reports

During the week of April 1, 2024, we performed a self-initiated audit at the Tallahassee Processing and Distribution Facility (P&DF) and three delivery units serviced by the P&DF. The delivery units included the Lake Jackson, Leon, and Westside Stations located in Tallahassee, FL.We issued individual reports for the three delivery units and the P&DF. We issued another report summarizing the results of our audits at all three delivery units with specific recommendations for management to address.

This compendium focuses on a total of 90 recommendations to the EPA that remained unimplemented-79 open and 11 unresolved-as of May 31, 2024. The 90 recommendations we address in this compendium represent $74.5 million in potential cost savings. The compendium includes 17 open or unresolved recommendations that the OIG deemed high priority, as well as 53 open recommendations that are at least three years old or will be by their scheduled completion date. This year we provide a separate analysis of the five unresolved OIG recommendations made to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board as of May 31, 2024.

The U.S. Postal Service implemented Freight Auction (FA) in October 2021 to solicit bids to transport mail on an “as needed” basis with the flexibility to schedule trips without requiring contractual changes. The FA program supports the Delivering for America vision with the goal to improve financial sustainability and service performance. Implementation of FA provides the Postal Service the opportunity to use the spot freight market to get competitive market pricing on surface trips and improve trailer utilization. The Postal Service spent about $159.5 million and $385.2 million for fiscal years (FY) 2022 and 2023, respectively, for FA trips.

The Office of Inspector General is issuing this inspection report to assess the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) processing of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) reconsideration requests.SBA began accepting COVID-19 EIDL applications on March 12, 2020, and continued to accept them through December 31, 2021, when the COVID-19 EIDL program ended. COVID-19 EIDL applicants who were not approved for a loan could request the agency reconsider their loan application, initiating the reconsideration process.We found SBA generally processed reconsideration requests timely and accurately. The agency approved and funded 77 of the 83 (or 93 percent) sampled COVID-19 EIDL reconsideration requests within 30 days of receiving all documents needed for processing. We also determined SBA processed 71 of the 83 (or 86 percent) sampled reconsideration requests accurately.We recommended SBA recover funds provided to ineligible applicants. The agency agreed with our recommendation and intends to recover funds through the normal repayment and collection processes.