Federal Reports

The U.S. Congress authorized the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to receive $48 billion in funding for the 5-year period beginning October 1, 2008, to assist foreign countries in combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Congress authorized additional funds to be appropriated through 2023.The Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 (the Act) requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Inspector General (OIG), among others, to provide oversight of the programs implemented under the Act, including PEPFAR. To meet this requirement, we have conducted a series of audits of organizations receiving PEPFAR funds from HHS, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In audits of PEPFAR recipients, some findings indicated common trends among the recipients.Our objectives were to identify: (1) trends related to findings in our prior audits of CDC PEPFAR recipients, (2) CDC's actions to improve oversight of PEPFAR recipients, and (3) internal control weaknesses in CDC's post-award oversight of PEPFAR recipients.

Two senior Amtrak Information Technology employees were terminated on December 11, 2020 for violating company policies by (1) steering contracts to close personal friends; (2) failing to disclose relationships between company employees and vendors; (3) engaging in conflicts of interest by approving invoices for personal gain; and (4) coordinating with contractors during a competitive solicitation, misrepresenting Amtrak’s requirements, and engaging in other activities that undermined the Procurement department’s ability to ensure its decisions were in the company’s best interest.

This audit report includes two findings that address weaknesses in the District’s internal control processes and one condition reported as an “other matter” – a condition that does not rise to the threshold of a reportable finding. The audit found that the District lacked adequate controls over its physical asset and inventory records and its management of equipment purchased with E-rate funds. In addition, KPMG identified an “other matter” in which the District failed to comply with state and local competitive bidding requirements. The auditors provided three recommendations to address the findings, including a recommendation that the Universal Service Administrative Company, the USF administrator, recover funds in the amount of $5,060. Management concurred with all three recommendations outlined in the report.

To (1) determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) made payments to beneficiaries and/or representative payees who were deceased according to Mississippi’s Office of Vital Records & Health Statistics and (2) identify non-beneficiaries in the State files whose death information did not appear in Agency records.

To determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) took appropriate actions to pay underpayments due terminated beneficiaries and improve controls based on our prior audit recommendations.

Our objective for this report was to assess the extent to which the company’s systems are interoperable with its hosts and tenants, and the company is ensuring that its systems are on and continuously operating.Amtrak expects its Positive Train Control (PTC) systems to operate with other railroads where the company runs on their tracks or it allows them to use the company’s tracks. Effective program management has helped the company achieve this progress. Amtrak, however, can take steps to better ensure its systems are on, operating continuously, are reliable, and are using accurate data to guide their operations. We found that Amtrak cannot fully measure PTC reliability because it does not have the electronic tools to easily access the data necessary for it and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to monitor system performance. As a result, reports on PTC reliability are incomplete and Amtrak cannot easily identify potential problems it may need to address promptly or longer-term. The company also faces two risks that may diminish the safety benefits PTC is intended to provide. First, the systems sometimes do not initialize before a train leaves a station or may disengage along a route. Program officials pointed out that, when such incidents occur, trains must still abide by traditional measures to ensure safe operations, such as obeying signaling systems and rules that guide engineers. The FRA will require stringent practices to address these situations be implemented by January 2022.Second, the systems require accurate data to know when to enforce temporary speed restrictions or prohibit trains from entering areas where employees are working, but dispatchers must manually enter these data into the systems. The company takes steps to help ensure the data dispatchers enter are accurate, but there is still a risk of human error.To address the findings, we recommended that the company research options for electronic tools to access data needed to monitor PTC performance and submit what it selects for funding consideration. In addition, we recommended that Amtrak determine what, if any, additional mitigations are needed when PTC does not operate as intended and initiate its plan to assess the risk of incorrect data entry.