Federal Reports

New York established a health insurance marketplace under the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to allow individuals and small businesses to shop for health insurance. The New York marketplace provides eligibility determination and enrollment services for both private health insurance plans offered through the marketplace and its State-based public health care programs: Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Office of Inspector General conducted risk assessments of the NCUA’s charge card programs as required by the Government Charge Card Abuse Prevention Act of 2012. The objectives of this engagement were, in part, to assess, identify, and analyze the risks of illegal, improper, or erroneous purchases and payments made through the NCUA’s purchase and travel card programs and determine whether the results of our risk assessments justified performing an audit. This engagement encompassed all three charge card programs and covered activity from October 1, 2016, through September 30, 2017.

OIG investigated allegations that Joseph Dubois filed a fraudulent surety bond to secure a contract at the Pine Hill School, Ramah Chapter of the Navajo Nation, NM.We found that the Ramah Navajo School Board contracted Dubois to renovate a building at the Pine Hill School. The contracts required him to obtain and provide a surety bond, but instead Dubois produced a fictitious surety bond that falsely appeared to be under the authority of a legitimate surety company.Dubois pled guilty to passing fictitious obligations and to tax evasion in U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison followed by 3 years of supervised release and was ordered to pay $410,550 in restitution to the Ramah Navajo School Board and the Internal Revenue Service.

The OIG examined whether the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), in its management of the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) program, ensured that accurate and timely subsistence allowance payments were made to eligible veterans. Veterans participating in the VR&E program receive a monthly subsistence allowance while they attend educational and training programs. The OIG found VR&E subsistence allowance payments were generally accurate and timely. In a sample of 120 subsistence allowance payments reviewed from November 2016, the OIG identified only four errors of overpayments and underpayments at two of the four VA regional offices the OIG visited. The four errors stemmed from a failure to update files and constituted a 3.3 percent incidence of error. The cumulative monetary impact to VA was $12,532 for the duration of the errors for the four cases involved. In March 2017, VR&E conducted refresher training for field employees, which partially focused on updating dependent information—the cause of three of the four errors. The OIG identified no significant issues of timeliness with respect to the initial payment. The OIG ensured the first subsistence allowance payment occurred in the month that followed the education/training start date. When this was a veteran’s first-time award, the OIG reviewed the timeliness of the award as well as how promptly the school/training facility was notified of the veteran’s authorization to attend following the approved written rehabilitation plan. The OIG advised the applicable VA regional offices’ management to review and correct the errors it had identified during site visits. Because of the relatively small monetary impact reflected in the errors identified, the OIG curtailed the scope of this audit and made no recommendations. The Executive in Charge for VBA concurred with the findings and provided no comments to the report.

Although Washington State performed the required onsite monitoring at all 20 of the group care facilities that we reviewed, this monitoring did not ensure that these facilities complied with State licensing requirements related to the health and safety of children in foster care, as required by Federal law. We determined that all 20 group care facilities did not comply with 1 or more State health and safety requirements. Specifically, these facilities did not comply with requirements related to medical safety (20 facilities); environmental, space, and equipment safety (18 facilities); background checks (16 facilities); food safety (11 facilities); and fire safety and emergency practices (7 facilities).