Federal Reports

Congress, NIH, and Federal intelligence agencies have raised concerns about foreign threats to the integrity of U.S. medical research and intellectual property. In August 2018, Dr. Francis Collins, Director of NIH, raised concerns that peer reviewers were, in some cases, inappropriately sharing confidential information with others. Subsequently, in 2018 Congress provided OIG with $5 million for oversight of NIH grant programs and operations, including the effectiveness of NIH's efforts to protect intellectual property derived from NIH-supported research. This study assesses the strengths and limitations of NIH's Center for Scientific Review (CSR)'s vetting of peer reviewer nominees before they begin reviewing applications for research grants. These peer reviewers have a unique opportunity to access confidential information in grant applications. Because of this access, it is important for NIH to ensure that peer reviewers do not inappropriately disclose or divert confidential information, including intellectual property.

Researchers have estimated that over 200,000 people die each year because of medical errors in hospitals. Learning from those and other, nonfatal events to improve patient safety is the goal of AHRQ's voluntary Patient Safety Organization (PSO) program. Hospitals' descriptions of their experiences with the program provide insight into the program's progress toward facilitating national learning from patient safety events. This review is the first to explore the extent to which hospitals participate in the PSO program and their perspectives on its value and challenges.

Our objective was to determine the amount of Social Security benefits misdirected because of unauthorized my Social Security direct deposit changes through May 2018.

PBGC has made progress in eliminating the unnecessary collection, maintenance, and use of customer social security numbers. However, additional steps are necessary given the volume of legacy documents containing SSNs, the Corporation’s continued acquisition of trusteed plan documents containing SSNs and known risks and limitations in PBGC information systems. We issued four recommendations related to PBGC’s policies and planning for continued reduction in the collection, maintenance and use of Social Security Numbers. PBGC agreed with the recommendations and plans to complete corrective actions by September 30, 2020.

Richland County did not always properly account for and expend Federal funds according to Federal regulations and FEMA guidelines. FEMA did not hold North Dakota accountable for fulfilling its grant management responsibilities, and North Dakota did not adequately manage the FEMA grant by monitoring the County to ensure it complied with applicable regulations and guidelines. The County failed to follow all Federal procurement regulations when awarding about $1.9 million in disaster-related contracts. We recommended that FEMA disallow $1,146,921 in ineligible contract costs and direct North Dakota to work with the County to verify that the County complies with all Federal grant requirements and establishes effective accounting systems. FEMA concurred with our three recommendations for improving County compliance in managing future Federal grants.