Federal Reports

The Minnesota Elderly Waiver program (the program) funds home- and community-based services for people aged 65 and older who are eligible for medical assistance and require the level of care provided in a nursing home but choose to live in the community, such as at a licensed family adult foster care home (home). Minnesota operates the program under a Federal waiver to its Medicaid State plan. We have conducted health and safety reviews of Head Start grantees and of regulated childcare facilities and wanted to determine whether there may be similar health and safety risks for vulnerable adults living in homes.

In response to a letter requesting that the OIG review the Department's actions related to certain provisions of the gainful employment and borrower defense regulations, we provided our views on the regulations and how the Department's proposed changes to those regulations could affect the integrity and efficiency of the student financial aid programs.

Although the Department and FSA made progress in strengthening their information security programs, we found weaknesses in the Department’s and FSA’s information systems, and those systems continued to be vulnerable to security threats. As guided by the maturity model used in the FY 2017 IG FISMA Metrics, we found the Department and FSA were not effective in all five security functions—Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. We also identified findings in all seven metric domains: (1) Risk Management, (2) Configuration Management, (3) Identity and Access Management, (4) Security Training, (5) Information Security Continuous Monitoring, (6) Incident Response, and (7) Contingency Planning.