Federal Reports

As part of our annual audit plan, we performed an audit of costs billed to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by Voith Hydro, Inc. (Voith) under Contract No. 9000, for hydro modernization, unit rehabilitation, and functional support services in support of TVA's hydro facilities, including Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Plant. The contract provided for TVA to compensate Voith for these services on either a fixed price, time and material, and/or target price estimate basis. Our audit objectives were to determine if (1) costs were billed in accordance with the terms and conditions of the contract and (2) tasks were issued using the most cost efficient pricing methodology. Our audit scope included about $119.6 million in costs TVA paid to Voith from August 20, 2014, through December 31, 2020. This included $118.2 million for fixed price projects and $1.4 million for time and material projects. In summary, we determined Voith billed TVA (1) at least $2,435,353 for labor classifications that did not have a corresponding labor rate in the contract and (2) $12,606 in excessive labor rates due to ineligible rate adjustments. In addition, based on the limited fixed price information we reviewed, it did not appear TVA was paying excessive prices by compensating Voith on primarily a fixed price basis. (Summary Only)

The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) provides a variety of benefits to eligible veterans, including monthly disability compensation or pension payments. VBA primarily relies on death notifications from the Social Security Administration (SSA) in an automated process called the death match to ensure that payments will properly stop when there is a record of a veteran’s death.The VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted a limited evaluation of VBA’s processes for discontinuing compensation and pension benefit payments to deceased veterans to help improve VBA’s efficiency as well as prevent or redress fraud and waste. The OIG team reviewed three samples and determined that, in one sample, VBA was unaware its systems failed to complete one automated weekly death match in December 2020. The failed weekly death match resulted in payments continuing to 43 veterans after their deaths. Of those, 29 payments were made for seven months until those veterans’ deaths were discovered by the OIG.In a second sample, the review team determined the death match mechanism was limited because VBA’s electronic systems contained incorrect social security numbers, which may result in VBA continuing to pay compensation or pension benefits to veterans after their deaths. The team reviewed a judgmental sample of 140 veterans and found that 87 of the records had incorrect social security numbers in VBA’s electronic systems. In a third sample, the team reviewed a random sample of 121 veterans with dates of death between January 2017 and February 2021 and determined that VBA could have minimized improper compensation or pension payments to deceased veterans if it had obtained death notification data from the Veterans Health Administration. The OIG made three recommendations to improve oversight of and communication for VBA’s death match process that can help prevent improper benefit payments from being made to deceased veterans.