Federal Reports

We found that the Department did not comply with the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act because its FY 2015 improper payment rate did not meet the reduction target for the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan (Direct Loan) program. The Department established an FY 2015 reduction target of 1.49 percent for the Direct Loan program; however the improper payment rate for the program was2.63 percent after the Department recalculated this rate to correct for the formula execution errors we identified during our audit. Similar to our previous IPERA audits, we found that the Department’s improper payment methodologies for the Federal Pell Grant and Direct Loanprograms were flawed, as its estimation methodologies did not include all program reviews that could identify improper payments. We also found the estimation methodology for the Pell program excluded sources of improper payments, such as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid/Internal Revenue Service Data Statistical Study, and fraud. Further, the estimation methodologies did not include all improper payments from ineligible programs or locations identified in program reviews. In addition, we found that Department’s reported improper payment estimates for both the Pell Grant and Direct Loan programs were inaccurate and unreliable because spreadsheet formulas used in the calculations were incorrect and the calculations deviated from the Office of Management and Budget-approved methodologies.

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The future of advertising mail—currently a critical product for the Postal Service’s bottom line—is uncertain. Key external factors impacting future advertising mail volumes are: the national economy, the growth of Internet advertising, and the degree to which Internet advertising displaces advertising mail. Despite the importance of external factors on advertising mail, the future of advertising mail is not predetermined.

This report provides a visual representation of data on the workload activities of Medicare benefit integrity contractors in calendar years 2012 and 2013. The report allows for a quick comparison of workload statistics across the 2 years, across contractors, and across Medicare programs and provides a baseline for reviewing contractors' quantitative results over time. The report provides descriptive information about the changes that occurred from 2012 to 2013 as well as the variation among contractors' workload statistics. However, the report does not examine the underlying causes of those changes or variations. The contractors include Program Safeguard Contractors, Zone Program Integrity Contractors, and the National Benefit Integrity Medicare Drug Integrity Contractor. Past OIG work has shown substantial variation among benefit integrity contractors with respect to the number of investigations they started and the number of cases that they referred to law enforcement. It has also shown that the contractors made limited use of proactive methods to identify potential fraud and abuse; and that they did not report workload statistics in a uniform manner. In addition, previous OIG work has identified anomalies in contractors' workload statistics, which may highlight issues with the CMS's oversight of these contractors. Although we have conducted previous studies on these individual contractor types, this is the first report to provide the results of benefit integrity activities across all of these contractors. Figure 1 provides a comparison of the results of benefit integrity contractors' activities between 2012 and 2013.