Federal Reports

Objectives: To determine whether the Social Security Administration (SSA) has established internal controls to (1) initiate enrollment, upon request, in the Direct Express® Debit Card program (Program) and (2) resolve benefits returned to the Agency because of an unfinished enrollment.

Objective: To determine how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the disability determination services’ (DDS) processing of disability claims.

The audit objectives were to determine whether program funds were managed in accordance with the ARC and Federal grant requirements.

An Engineering Supervisor based in New York City violated company policies by working in violation of the 16-hour rule, receiving unnecessary “Time Paid Not Worked,” and receiving pay for more than 24 hours in a day. Specifically, we found 41 occasions when the supervisor claimed compensatory time for minimal or no work and 35 occasions when the employee did not swipe in or out on a time-and-attendance machine, as required by company policy. The employee resigned in lieu of his disciplinary hearing and is ineligible for rehire.

The comments are in response to The Social Security Administration’s Oversight of Beneficiaries Who Receive Benefits Under the Direct Express® Debit Card Program, A-04-20-50977, that was submitted by Comerica Bank on July 25, 2023 pursuant to Pub. L. No. 117- 263, § 5274.

Colby Frazier, a resident of Long Beach, California, was sentenced to 30-months in prison on charges of Wire Fraud and Aggravated Identity Theft in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, on June 21, 2023, for his participation in a "phishing" scheme in which he fraudulently obtained credit card and personal identifying information (PII) from his victims, including names and banking information. Frazier used the victims' credit card information and PII to purchase online travel tickets on common carriers, including Amtrak, and then resold the tickets to other individuals and kept the proceeds. Frazier was previously indicted on July 11, 2019, and he pleaded guilty to the charges on May 19, 2021. He was also ordered to pay $67,056 in restitution to Amtrak.

We performed audits at the Southern Maine Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC) and five delivery units serviced by the P&DC in the Portland Maine region during the week of March 13, 2023. These audits responded to a request from Senator Susan Collins and interest from Representative Chellie Pingree in mail operations in the Portland, ME region. The delivery units included the Industrial Park Annex, Saco, ME; Lewiston Main Post Office (MPO), Lewiston, ME; Main Office Carrier Section, Portland, ME; Southern Maine Carrier Unit, Scarborough, ME; and Sanford MPO, Sanford, ME.

The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted a national review evaluating the transition of clinical care for service members with opioid use disorder (OUD) from the Department of Defense (DoD) to the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). OUD is an established risk factor for opioid overdose death and suicide. Failure to identify and document a patient’s OUD history may decrease the likelihood of future providers using medically relevant information in clinical decision-making and may put patients at risk for adverse outcomes, such as overdose.The OIG conducted electronic health record reviews for two groups identified from a sample of discharged service members with an OUD diagnosis documented in the DoD treatment record, who had a VHA primary care or mental health encounter between the date of DoD discharge and July 4, 2021. Group 1 consisted of patient records without an OUD diagnosis in VHA data and group 2 consisted of patients with an opioid-related death.Deficiencies were found in VHA primary care and mental health providers’ documentation identifying OUD in encounters, progress notes, and problem lists for both study groups reviewed, despite having a diagnosis of OUD in DoD treatment records.The OIG evaluated provider perceptions of barriers documenting OUD and use of risk mitigation strategies. More than half of VHA providers who responded to a questionnaire reported no expectation of reviewing DoD treatment records when completing an intake and identified barriers reviewing DoD treatment records.The OIG made five recommendations to the VA Under Secretary for Health related to the identification of barriers for providers documenting OUD in electronic health records; training on the use, navigation, and retrieval of DoD treatment record information; evaluation of the barriers to access and use of DoD treatment records; and evaluating and updating processes for the identification of patients with OUD.

The Office of the Inspector General audited the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) use of remote application and desktop virtualization client due to the risks of (1) potential system intrusion through misconfigurations and (2) continued elevated remote users during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found the configuration management control for TVA’s remote application desktop virtualization client was ineffective. However, we determined compensating access controls were in place to mitigate the risk to an overall acceptable level.