Federal Reports

This Office of Inspector General Comprehensive Healthcare Inspection Program report describes the results of a focused evaluation of the inpatient and outpatient care provided at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, which includes the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center and multiple outpatient clinics throughout California. This evaluation focused on five key operational areas:• Leadership and organizational risks• Quality, safety, and value• Medical staff privileging• Environment of care• Mental health (focusing on emergency department and urgent care center suicide prevention initiatives)The OIG issued nine recommendations for improvement in three areas:1. Quality, Safety, and Value• Peer review improvement actions• Patient safety event root cause analysis2. Medical Staff Privileging• Focused Professional Practice Evaluation time frames• Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation service-specific criteria• Privileging request recommendations in Medical Executive Council meeting minutes3. Environment of Care• Inspecting, testing, and maintaining medical equipment• Maintaining equipment and furnishings and keeping patient care areas clean and safe• Using breathable shower curtains in mental health inpatient unit bathrooms• Recording and accessing video or audio monitoring equipment

Components within the Department of Homeland Security protect High Value Asset (HVA) systems with security and privacy controls designed to keep sensitive information safe. We determined that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) implemented most security and privacy controls tested for the selected HVA system, in compliance with applicable Federal and DHS requirements.

Objective: To determine whether the Social Security Administration issued payments to beneficiaries who were deceased according to Oregon records.

As a streamlined way to reduce interest rates on VA-guaranteed mortgages, interest rate reduction refinance loans (IRRRLs) are popular with veterans, especially when interest rates are low. In fiscal year (FY) 2020, VA reported a 598 percent increase in the number of these loans from the previous year—from 94,861 to 662,065, with IRRRLs totaling about $199 billion.Given the considerable increase in the use of IRRRLs and the large number of borrowers at risk for overcharges, the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted this audit to determine whether oversight of IRRRLs by the Veterans Benefits Administration’s (VBA) Loan Guaranty Service (LGY) ensures veterans are protected from unfavorable refinancing and unallowable or unreasonable refinance charges.The OIG found VBA made meaningful improvements in May 2020 regarding borrowers’ fee recoupment (recovering closing costs within three years), net tangible benefit (an interest rate reduction of at least one-half percent), and protections against serial refinances. However, some FY 2020 borrowers were still potentially overcharged through unsupported, unallowable, or unreasonable closing costs. Estimates totaled roughly $3 million for approximately 18,400 borrowers based on the FY 2020 audit sample. Also, borrowers did not always receive the loan comparison documents they needed to make informed decisions about whether to refinance. The OIG estimated that lenders did not provide the required statements at the time of application for at least 3 percent of the IRRRLs in FY 2020. This omission may have affected some 2,900 borrowers. LGY also lacked controls and sufficiently detailed guidance to fully perform loan oversight and quality assurance.Despite differences in some legal interpretations, VBA concurred with the OIG’s nine recommendations to strengthen LGY controls and quality assurance policies and procedures that would more effectively protect borrowers from unfavorable IRRRLs and guarantee loans that comply with program requirements.

What We Looked AtThis report presents the results of our quality control review (QCR) of an attestation examination of the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Enterprise Services Center (ESC) controls. ESC provides financial management services to DOT and other agencies and operates under the direction of DOT’s Chief Financial Officer. The Office of Management and Budget requires ESC, as a service organization, to either provide its user organizations with independent audit reports on the design and effectiveness of its internal controls or allow user auditors to perform tests of its controls. We contracted with KPMG LLP to conduct this examination subject to our oversight. The objectives of the review were to determine whether (1) management’s description of ESC’s systems is fairly presented, (2) ESC’s controls are suitably designed, and (3) ESC’s controls are operating effectively throughout the period of October 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023. We performed a QCR on KPMG’s report and related documentation. What We FoundOur QCR disclosed no instances in which KPMG did not comply, in all material respects, with generally accepted Government auditing standards. Our RecommendationsKPMG made no recommendations. We are publicly releasing a summary of the report rather than the full report itself because the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), as amended, requires OIGs to take appropriate steps to ensure the protection of information that, if disclosed, may adversely affect information security.1144 U.S.C. § 3555(f)

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has limited ability to identify and combat commodities imported as part of trade-based money laundering (TBML) schemes. Specifically, ICE does not have automated technology to identify import commodities at high risk for TBML schemes. Instead, it identifies TBML activities through manual searches of import records, which is time-consuming. Funding constraints and competing priorities have hampered ICE’s development of automated capabilities to identify TBML schemes.