Federal Reports

During the course of our fieldwork, we learned of two FSA initiatives that pertain to identifying and addressing misrepresentation by schools. FSA is in the process of implementing a new student complaints tracking system, called Enterprise, and a Student Aid Enforcement Unit. One of the four divisions of the new unit will be an investigations division that will identify potential misconduct, such as misrepresentation, or high-risk activity among schools and protect Federal funding. We are closing this audit because FSA plans to implement these two initiatives throughout 2016; these two initiatives will be significant control activities that represent major changes to FSA’s process for identifying and addressing misrepresentation by schools.

During this reporting period, we issued the audit of National Endowment for the Art’s (NEA) fiscal year 2015 financial statements, two audit reports on grantees, one special review report on NEA compliance with information security, one memorandum report on NEA management challenges, one briefing review on internal compliance, and issued one desk audit review and summary of a grantee Single Audit. Also, the NEA issued two debarments resulting from recommendations of a prior Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit report. Additionally, the OIG issued and posted several Awareness Bulletins and brochures. The annual financial statement audit was completed and resulted in a clean opinion, with one significant deficiency. The annual FISMA audit was completed and resulted in eight recommendations.