Sandy Recovery Improvement Act Review

: In July 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that it awarded 252 projects under the Public Assistance alternative procedures pilot program valued at $11.9 billion, with just 26 of those projects (10.32 percent) closed. During our fieldwork, we gained access to FEMA’s grant management system of record and reviewed supporting documentation for the project worksheets in our scope to determine if FEMA followed its criteria when validating cost estimates. However, FEMA did not sufficiently document actions that it took to validate subrecipient cost estimates to ensure costs are reasonable. Of the three obligated projects we reviewed during our fieldwork, we did not find evidence that FEMA completed the required steps identified to validate the reasonableness of subrecipient cost estimates.