Federal Reports

This audit report shows Kearney noted two of the 10 FCC programs,the Universal Service Fund (USF) Lifeline (LL) program and the USF High Cost (HC) program,were not compliant with at least one PIIA criteria. Overall, Kearney’s audit report includes six findings along with 17 recommendations.

The EPA needs to implement appropriate control measures to better identify and reduce the risk of its improper payments.

Audit of case handling efforts to reduce charge filing to disposition time for FY 2019 and FY 2020 as compared to FY 2018.

What We Looked AtThe Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 (PIIA) requires agencies to identify, report, and reduce improper payments in programs susceptible to significant improper payments. For fiscal year 2021, the Department of Transportation (DOT) tested three programs with total expenditures over $49 billion and estimated that about 1.41 percent were improper payments. PIIA also requires inspectors general to report annually on their agencies' compliance. Accordingly, our audit objective was to determine whether DOT complied in 2021 with PIIA's requirements.What We FoundDOT is in compliance with PIIA requirements. For fiscal year 2021, DOT reported improper payment estimates for three susceptible programs. The payment integrity information in DOT's 2021 Agency Financial Report and data posted to the Payment Accuracy website were accurate and complete. A clerical error related to payment recapture data for two programs occurred but did not impact DOT's compliance with PIIA. DOT conducted four risk assessments for programs and reported one program, the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act program, susceptible to significant improper payments. DOT published improper and unknown payment amounts and estimated future rates on the Payment Accuracy website. However, we found issues with the universe population identification procedures for the Federal Aviation Administration's and FTA's Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 activities. The Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Highway Planning and Construction Program did not meet its reduction target of .80 percent and reported estimated improper payments about $697 million. The total estimate did not impact FHWA's compliance with PIIA. For fiscal year 2021, DOT reported an improper and unknown payment estimate of less than 10 percent. FHWA improved its corrective action plan by focusing on root causes of improper and unknown payments and prioritized these actions.RecommendationsDOT concurred with our three recommendations to help improve its reporting processes for improper payments. We consider these recommendations resolved but open pending completion of planned actions.

The objective of our audit was to determine whether the U.S. Department of Education complied with the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 (PIIA) for fiscal year (FY) 2021.The Department did not comply with the PIIA because it did not meet one of the six compliance requirements. The Department published unreliable improper payment estimates for three programs that required an estimate for FY 2021: Title I, Part A; Pell; and Direct Loan. We reviewed the corrective action plans and found the Department’s Title I, Part A proposed corrective actions to be inadequate and ineffective in addressing the true root cause of the reported improper payments.