Federal Reports

The marketplace for traditional Postal Service products is increasingly competitive. In addition to the long term trend toward electronic media, Postal Service products face intense pressures brought about by the Great Recession. This paper explores an open question raised by these disruptive trends: Are Postal Service customers becoming more price sensitive? Though intuition may suggest that growing competition would have this effect, the answer to this question is best found by letting the data do the talking.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements

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During the semiannual period, NEA OIG issued nine reports, which contained forty recommendations based on audits and evaluations. Twenty recommendations were related to NEA programs and twenty were related to NEA grantees. Three recommendations related to NEA grantees were cleared during this reporting period. We also issued one memorandum to the agency related to a NEA grantee which contained one recommendation. The agency implemented the recommendation during this reporting period. We conducted a joint investigation with the OIGs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), of a Massachusetts public broadcasting company for allegedly failing to properly track and account for Federal grant funds. Our investigation found that the broadcasting company could not demonstrate that project costs charged to the Federal grants from the three agencies were reasonable, allowable, and allocable. The U.S. Attorney’s Office entered into a civil settlement whereby, without admitting liability, the company repaid $300,173—of which $1,747 was associated with NEA funds—and entered into a five-year compliance plan to strengthen its oversight of Federal funds. The 2012 Financial Statement Audit Report was issued November 8, 2012, and resulted in an unqualified (clean) opinion. The FY 2012 FISMA evaluation concluded that although NEA made progress in complying with FISMA, some additional improvements were needed.