Federal Reports

The Office of Inspector General is tasked with ensuring efficiency, accountability, and integrity in the U.S. Postal Service. We also have the distinct mission of helping to maintain confidence in the mail and postal system, as well as to improve the Postal Service's bottom line. We use audits and investigations to help protect the integrity of the Postal Service. Our Semiannual Report to Congress presents a snapshot of the work we did to fulfill our mission for the six-month period ending September 30, 2022. Our dynamic report format provides readers with easy access to facts and information, as well as succinct summaries of the work by area. Links are provided to the full reports featured in this report, as well as to the appendices.

October 2022 Semiannual Report to Congress

To view the report, please click on the link below.

This report was submitted to the Comptroller General in accordance with Section 5 of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Act of 2008. The report summarizes the activities of GAO’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the six-month reporting period ending September 30, 2022. During the reporting period, the OIG initiated work on two performance audits and continued work on an additional performance audit. In addition, the OIG closed seven investigations and opened 22 new investigations. The OIG processed 75 substantive hotline complaints, many of which were referred to other OIGs for action because the matters involved were within their jurisdictions. The OIG remained active in the GAO and OIG communities by briefing new GAO employees on its audit and investigative missions, briefing GAO teams on the work of the GAO OIG, and participating in Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency committees and working groups, including those related to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.

The objective of our inspection was to determine the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) compliance with Experimental Sites Initiative (ESI) reporting requirements.We found that the Department is not complying with ESI reporting requirements. The Department has not published a comprehensive ESI report since the 2010–2011 award year report. The Department published two ESI reports in 2020, but these reports did not satisfy the reporting requirements as they each covered only one experiment, not all recently completed and ongoing experiments. There are 15 ESI experiments that have been implemented by the Department since the issuance of the last comprehensive report that have not yet been reported on by the Department.

The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) assessed VA’s compliance with requirements to report staffing and vacancy data on its public-facing website and the clarity of related explanations. VA is mandated to publicly release this information each quarter under the Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act of 2018 to promote transparency in personnel management. The MISSION Act also requires the OIG to review VA’s data-reporting website and make recommendations for improvement. After discussions with the review team, VA took action to correct its time-to-hire calculation starting with the June 2022 quarterly report to include every required step of the hiring process. VA also explained OIG-identified discrepancies in its June 2022 report after the review team discussed them with responsible officials. Consequently, the OIG did not make further recommendations on these issues. The review team found that VA could strengthen its explanation of vacant positions to show that the data were rounded and included part-time positions. VA agreed and included that information beginning with the April 2022 staffing and vacancy report. Additionally, the team observed that VA could increase the value of its reported information by summarizing and identifying trends in the expanded time-to-hire data, as done with the vacancy, onboarding, and gains and losses information published under the MISSION Act. In response, VA added summary tab information beginning in June 2022 that interpreted the new time to hire data requirements.The OIG made two recommendations: (1) request legislative relief from Congress on data it is unable to report or (2) ensure data limitations are clearly explained that preclude VA from reporting all elements of time-to-hire data under the Veterans Health Care and Benefits Improvement Act.