Federal Reports

This Semiannual Report includes the activities and accomplishments of this office from October 1, 2018, through March 31, 2019. The audits, investigations, and related work highlighted in the report are products of our mission to identify and stop fraud, waste, and abuse, and promote accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness through our oversight of the Department’s programs and operations. The work that the OIG accomplished over the last 6 months reflects our ongoing dedication and commitment to our mission and goals. In our audit-related work, we issued 12 reports and recommendations aimed at improving Department programs and operations.

Semiannual Report to Congress

During the week of May 6, 2019, we visited five Border Patrol stations and two ports of entry in the El Paso sector as part of our unannounced spot inspections of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) holding facilities and observed dangerous holding conditions at the Paso Del Norte Bridge (PDT) Border Patrol station that require immediate attention. Specifically, PDT does not have the capacity to hold the hundreds currently in custody safely, and has held the majority of its detainees beyond the 72 hours outlined in CBP’s Transport, Escort, Detention and Search standards. We recommend that the DHS take immediate steps to alleviate dangerous overcrowding at PDT.

DHS OIG determined that DHS had controls in place when it issued, solicited, selected, and mitigated risks for its three consortia Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) active in fiscal year 2017 for development of prototypes for border and cyber security, and research in critical infrastructure protection. However, DHS could better manage consortia OTAs by periodically reassessing their continued use. Although DHS requires an agreement analysis to determine its continued use of its other transaction authority at each new phase of the OTA, it does not require an assessment of an OTA’s effectiveness. As a result, the Department may not be receiving the most effective research and efficient use of its staffing resources. We made one recommendation that DHS modify its policies to require documenting additional assessments to ongoing OTAs. DHS concurred with our report recommendation. The recommendation is resolved and will remain open until the Department provides evidence to support that corrective actions are

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opioids were involved in more than 48,000 deaths in 2017, and opioid deaths were 6 times higher in 2017 than in 1999. CDC has awarded funding to States to address the nonmedical use of prescription drugs and to address opioid overdoses. We are conducting a series of reviews of States that received CDC funding to enhance their prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs). We selected Kentucky for review because it had the second highest age-adjusted drug overdose fatality rate in the United States in 2013.

Provider-preventable conditions (PPCs) are certain reasonably preventable conditions caused by medical accidents or errors in a health care setting. Federal regulations effective July 1, 2011, prohibit Medicaid payments for services related to PPCs. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) delayed its enforcement of the regulations until July 1, 2012, to allow States time to develop and implement new payment policies. This review is one in a series of OIG reviews of States' Medicaid payments for inpatient hospital services related to PPCs.