Open Recommendations

Issue a reminder to ensure employees follow SSA’s policy when they authorize direct payments to incapable beneficiaries while they continue developing for payees, follow up to assess how beneficiaries are managing their benefits, and document the results of the followups.

The Chief Information Officer, in conjunction with the Chief Operating Officer, should implement more prohibitive controls for allowing users to ******************* ****************

The Chief Information Officer, in conjunction with the Chief Operating Officer, should revise the DLP rules to be more restrictive to help prevent intentional data exfiltration.

The Chief Information Officer, in conjunction with the Chief Operating Officer, should continue to ensure that the managers and executives responsible for reviewing and approving BEARS ********************** requests carefully review all requests and only approve requests with sufficient and appropriate responses to the required questions.

Provide refresher training on I.R.C. §§ 6103(e)(7) and (e)(8) to all contact representatives in the AM and to all ITASs in the FA. This training should include information about the usefulness and availability of the Disclosure Office and Disclosure Help Desk.

Update Revenue Procedure 2013-14 to include the language found in the Treasury Regulation § 301.7216-3 that the consent statement must identify the purpose of disclosure and specific recipient(s).

Evaluate whether any clarifications or updates to Revenue Procedure 2013-14 or Treasury Regulation § 301.7216-3 are needed to address concerns or raise awareness of data sharing practices with tax software companies that use pixels.

Identify and implement potential solutions that will ensure that Authorized e-file Providers comply with the regulatory requirements of taxpayer consent statements. This can include, for example, sample reviews of tax software companies’ taxpayer consent statements or creating a data element to track if taxpayers are consenting to sharing their information with third parties.

We recommend that the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, as the delegated Federal Geographic Data Committee Chair, conduct an analysis to identify the root cause(s) of the geospatial dataset unavailability on GeoPlatform.

We recommend that the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, as the delegated Federal Geographic Data Committee Chair, conduct an analysis to determine the costs, benefits, and feasibility of resolving the root causes identified with GeoPlatform.

We recommend that the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, as the delegated Federal Geographic Data Committee Chair, implement appropriate changes based on the root cause and cost benefit analyses to address dataset availability issues.

We recommend that the Office of the Chief Information Officer develop and implement a methodology for the bureaus to identify all DOI geospatial-related costs to ensure consistency.

We recommend that the Office of the Chief Information Officer, in the absence of Federal Geographic Data Committee standards, identify relevant best practices and develop requirements for specific data fields for National Geospatial Data Assets in alignment with best practices.

We recommend that the Office of the Chief Information Officer direct the bureaus to track all geospatial-related costs using the methodology developed in recommendation 4 and report these costs to the Office of the Chief Information Officer annually.

Take corrective action for the subrecipient monitoring and agreement issues cited for eight of the ESG-CV grantees reviewed, and provide additional guidance and technical assistance as needed to ensure that they understand requirements.

Develop and implement additional subrecipient monitoring training and guidance for all ESG grantees.

Confirm VA has resumed submitting biweekly reports and, therefore, has submitted reports from June 2023 to present as required by the VA Transparency & Trust Act of 2021.

Confirm that the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 section 8002 quarterly reports are submitted to Congress within the time frame established on the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2022 and 2023, which is no later than 30 days after the end of each fiscal quarter.

Coordinate with administration and staff office chief financial officers to ensure that the finance office staff responsible for the management of open obligations know and understand VA financial policy requirements for the review of open obligations included in quarterly obligation reports.

Work with the relevant components to better align metrics across the Department and to determine what metrics for the ransomware threat, including metrics tracking disruption efforts, are most impactful, and which demonstrate the effectiveness of its actions to combat the ransomware threat.

Assess the U.S. Attorneys' Offices (USAO) implementation of the deconfliction policy, for ransomware cases, to ensure that federal prosecutors have a consistent understanding of the policy and comply with its requirements.

Rec. 1: The DoD OIG recommended that the Deputy Commandant, Manpower and Reserve Affairs, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, develop and disseminate guidance providing a consistent approach for documenting and uploading dwell waiver requests to the Service member's Electronic Service Record to ensure that a Service member's consent to mobilization while in dwell is properly documented and maintained.

Rec. 4: The DoD OIG recommended that the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Headquarters, Department of the Army, develop and issue guidance applicable to the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve for maintaining documentation supporting Service members consent to mobilization while in dwell.

We recommend that USAID's Chief Information Officer develop and implement written guidance for performing and documenting cost-benefit and alternative analyses for cloud acquisitions before procuring cloud services.

We recommend that USAID's Chief Information Officer develop and implement a written procedure to document the Chief Information Officer's review and approval of all cloud service acquisition plans.