Federal Reports

For our final report on the audit of the U.S. Census Bureau's (the Bureau's) incident response process, our audit objective was to assess the adequacy of the Bureau's process to respond to cybersecurity incidents according to federal and U.S. Department of Commerce requirements. We found the following: I. the Bureau missed opportunities to mitigate a critical vulnerability, which resulted in the exploitation of vital servers; II. the Bureau did not discover and report the incident in a timely manner; III. the Bureau did not maintain sufficient system logs, which hindered incident investigation; IV. the Bureau did not conduct a lessons-learned session; and V. the Bureau continued operating servers that were no longer supported by the vendor.

Each year, increased mail volume during peak mailing season — November through January — significantly strains the Postal Service’s processing and distribution network. During the peak mailing season of FY 2021, increased package volume and reduced employee availability resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic added even more strain on the distribution network and led to temporary embargoes of up to 17 days for certain mail types at nine mail processing facilities: the Birmingham, AL Annex; West Valley, AZ processing and distribution center (P&DC); Baltimore, MD P&DC; Detroit, MI network distribution center (NDC); New Jersey (City), NJ NDC; Northwest Rochester, NY NDC; Cleveland, OH P&DC; Springdale, OH Annex; and Philadelphia, PA NDC. Our objective was to evaluate the operational impacts experienced by the Postal Service before and after the embargoes and redirections at mail processing facilities during the fiscal year (FY) 2021 peak mailing season.

Objective: To determine the appropriateness of payments the Social Security Administration (SSA) issued to beneficiaries who were deceased according to Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services (CMS) records.