Federal Reports

To address occupational shortages and support hiring efforts, VA leverages federal regulations that allow agencies to offer recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives to encourage candidates to accept positions that are difficult to fill or to keep high-quality staff. The OIG conducted this audit to evaluate VA’s controls over and governance of the use of these incentives for VHA positions. Although these types of incentives were used mostly for positions on staffing shortage lists, VA did not effectively govern the incentive process to ensure responsible VHA officials consistently captured mandatory information necessary to support an incentive award. The OIG team estimated 30 percent of incentives paid during fiscal years 2020 through 2023 were missing forms, lacked a sufficient justification, or were missing signatures. As a result, VHA paid employees about $340.9 million in incentives that were not adequately supported. Furthermore, the OIG team found VHA did not consistently include sufficient workforce and succession plan narratives for an estimated 20 percent of retention incentives, note employee performance ratings for 7 percent of relocation incentives, or obtain self-certifications for about 71 percent of employees who relocated. The team also identified 28 employees who received retention incentive payments up to an additional 11 and a half years after their award period had expired. VA improperly paid about $4.6 million to these employees for incentives that should have been terminated. The OIG made eight recommendations to improve the oversight of these incentives.

Why We Did This Report

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General conducted this evaluation to determine South Carolina’s capacity to manage and use Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds for its Clean Water State Revolving Fund program.

Summary of Findings

South Carolina’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund, or CWSRF, program sufficiently meets two of the four dimensions of capacity: financial and organizational. South Carolina faces challenges related to stakeholder and human capital capacity. If South Carolina does not take steps to address those challenges, millions of IIJA dollars intended for water infrastructure improvements may not reach the state’s communities.

This Office of Inspector General (OIG) Healthcare Facility Inspection program report describes the results of a focused evaluation of the care provided at the VA St. Louis Healthcare System in Missouri. This evaluation focused on five key content domains:
•    Culture
•    Environment of care
•    Patient safety
•    Primary care
•    Veteran-centered safety net
The OIG issued five recommendations for improvement in two domains:
1.    Environment of care
•    Supply storage locations and expired supplies
•    Video laryngoscope supplies
•    Safe and clean patient care areas
•    Preventive maintenance for biomedical equipment
2.    Patient safety
•    Service-level workflows and processes to monitor patient test result communications

The United States Coast Guard (Coast Guard) did not meet its illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing interdiction goals for fiscal years 2023 and 2024. For both FYs, the Coast Guard set its interdiction goal at 40 percent. This goal reflects efforts to prevent illegal foreign fishing vessels from encroaching on the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). It measures the percent of detected vessels successfully interdicted by the Coast Guard.

The NCUA OIG conducted this self-initiated audit to assess how effectively the NCUA shared cyber threat information. Our objectives were to determine whether the NCUA: 1) effectively used shared cyber threat information for the supervision of credit unions; and 2) implemented effective processes to share cyber threat information to support credit union and financial system resiliency. The scope of our audit covered cyber threat information sharing from March 1, 2022, through December 31, 2024.

Our audit determined that the NCUA needed to mature its governance processes for cyber threat information sharing to support supervision of credit unions more effectively during a cybersecurity event or incident that may increase risk to the Share Insurance Fund and financial services sector stability. Additionally, NCUA did not effectively acquire, analyze, and use cyber threat information for internal analysis and external response. Finally, NCUA continues to need statutory examination and oversight authority over third-party vendors to be able to effectively assess and monitor third-party cybersecurity exposures.