Open Recommendations

Establish means to periodically validate the status information of facilities pain management teams.

Require the program and the chief operating officer to assess and ensure corrective actions are taken to address each medical facilitys lack of progress in achieving compliance with the requirement to have a pain management team as mandated by the Jason Simcakoski Memorial and Promise Act.

Determine the allowability of $300,245 ($15,786 in questioned ineligible
costs and $284,459 in cost share contribution shortfall amounts) on pages 24 to 26 of the audit report and recover any amount that is unallowable.

Verify that Appleseeds Academy corrects the two instances of material
noncompliance detailed on pages 22 and 23 of the audit report.

The Chief Information Officer should ensure that non-tax paper forms requiring one or more signatures are digitally converted and integrated with e-Signature Services capability by the established time frames.

The Chief Privacy Officer should review the 1,334 individual taxpayer accounts and if warranted, take appropriate actions to place the data breach indicator on tax accounts and mail notification letters to additional taxpayers affected by the data breach.

The Chief Privacy Officer should continue working to identify all individual and business taxpayers impacted by the unauthorized disclosure. If warranted, take appropriate actions to place the data breach indicator on tax accounts and mail notification letters to additional taxpayers affected by the data breach.

Develop and implement uniform procedures for the FSM desk monitoring review, including a second level review for the FSM monitoring reviews and process for each inspection type.

Update the FSM monitoring plan and FSM qualitative monitoring database to: (a) clearly define the monitoring questions, (b) include a section for Q7 New Not Ready to Show (NRTS) properties, (c) define which routine inspection reports will be reviewed to conduct the routine inspection monitoring reviews and (d) develop a monitoring question to evaluate photo date stamps.

Ensure that program officials periodically provide all FSM CORs and staff involved in the monitoring process uniform property inspection training.

Update review procedures to ensure accurate responses to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) payment integrity data call prompts, compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019, and that information is complete, accurate, and consistent before the final submission of the OMB payment integrity data call; and further refine reviews of published information on PaymentAccuracy.gov.

Maintain the Employment and Training Administration’s current focus on increasing technical assistance and funding to states to improve improper payment reduction strategies to reduce the improper payments estimate rate below the 10 percent threshold.

Update the Employment and Training Administration’s policies and procedures over the reporting of Federal Pandemic unemployment Compensation, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance information to include outlays after the expiration of the programs, until such time as the outlays are no longer greater than the statutory threshold.

The Readjustment Counseling Service Chief Officer considers developing written guidance for vet center closure and temporary relocation processes including oversight responsibilities.

Office of Programs should Document its consideration of potential risks of not performing the quarterly
Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act quality assurance review procedures. This documentation should
include both quantitative and qualitative risks.

Office of Programs should Document the compensating controls or alternative procedures which will be performed
timely to mitigate the risks of not performing the quarterly assurance review procedures, as designed.

Office of Programs should Ensure that the other compensating controls for detecting and preventing
unemployment and sickness improper payments are operating effectively.

Bureau of Fiscal Operations should Develop and document compensating controls to determine if employee pay
is calculated using the correct gross pay amount and is supported with source documentation available to the
Bureau of Fiscal Operations. If improper gross pay amounts are identified, determine the root cause, and
take action to resolve the improper pay amounts.

Direct USAC to conduct an in-depth root cause analysis for IPs related to missing or insufficient documentation used to support the carriers’ submission of continuing property records and depreciation/amortization information for USF-HC Legacy. USAC should continue to engage with carriers to understand systemic issues contributing to these types of IPs. USAC should develop targeted corrective actions based on the findings.

Enhance oversight of the USF-HC Legacy program by increasing the frequency of monitoring and reviewing carrier-reported data. For example, implement interim random sampling of payments or use AI to identify and detect patterns of non-compliance.

Develop a phased reduction target plan for the USF-HC Legacy program with clear milestones and accountability measures to ensure it is realistic and achievable based on past performance and current challenges.

Implement a more rigorous internal review process for IP reporting to include performing quarterly validation reviews to detect and prevent errors in identified IP amounts before reports are finalized. Further, all quarterly validation reports should be reconciled against the final annual report to identify and resolve discrepancies prior to the data call submission.

Introduce a secondary review or correction window between FCC and USAC before finalizing reports for the OMB data call.

Revise the outstanding categories in the FY 2025 data call submission to reflect the correct recovery audit amounts outstanding.

We recommend that FNS continue to carry out the plan described in its S&EMP in order to publish IP and UP estimates for FNS SFSP in the accompanying materials to future annual financial statements, which includes PaymentAccuracy.gov. In the meantime, we recommend that FNS evaluate if some payments should be considered unknown payments by devising a method to determine the amount of potential IPs and report these as UPs until the above-mentioned methodology has been finalized. If FNS is unable to devise a method to do this, we recommend that this is disclosed in PaymentAccuracy.gov.
For each year of non-compliance…