Federal Reports

We determined that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations used overtime in accordance with policies and procedures. The Customs Officer Pay Reform Act provides guidance on the use of overtime and premium pay for CBP officers and sets a statutory fiscal year maximum on overtime and premium pay earnings (pay cap). Per the Act, an officer may not exceed the pay cap unless the pay cap is waived.

This report presents the results of the System and Organization Controls 1 Type 2 examination conducted in accordance with relevant attestation standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Finance Center (NFC) description of its payroll and personnel systems used to process user entities payroll and human resource transactions throughout the period October 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024. The report contains an unmodified opinion on the description and controls that were suitably designed to provide reasonable assurance that the control objectives would be achieved.

This report presents the results of the System and Organization Controls 1 Type 2 examination conducted in accordance with relevant attestation standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) description of its data center hosting and security systems used to process user entities’ transactions throughout the period October 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024. The report contains an unmodified opinion on the description and controls that were suitably designed to provide reasonable assurance that the control objectives would be achieved.

This report presents the results of our audit of the Mail Theft Mitigation and Response – Chicago, IL.

We audited HUD and its grantees’ monitoring of subrecipients and contractors in HUD’s Emergency Solutions Grants Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (ESG-CV) program to assess subrecipient monitoring in the program.  ESG and ESG-CV grantees often rely on subrecipients and contractors to carry out ESG-CV-funded activities on behalf of the grantees, and are required to monitor subrecipients to ensure that the purpose of the grant funds awarded is achieved and funds are spent on only eligible applicants and activities. HUD is responsible for ensuring that grantees are performing this oversight.  In August 2022, OIG found that 87 percent of ESG-CV grantees provided funds to subrecipients, and of that group 84 percent reported the pandemic affected their ability to effectively monitor subrecipients.  The ESG-CV funding represented a 1,379 percent increase to the regular 2020 annual ESG appropriation.  These factors place an increased importance on HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development’s (CPD) monitoring how well its grantees, in turn, monitor subrecipients and contractors.CPD conducts risk-based monitoring of its ESG-CV grantees to ensure that grantee monitoring of subrecipients met 2 CFR part 200 requirements.  Through this monitoring, CPD identified deficiencies in grantees’ subrecipient monitoring and CPD took steps to resolve these findings with the grantees.  In addition, CPD provided training on monitoring requirements and best practices.  CPD’s efforts to ensure that ESG-CV grantees appropriately monitored their subrecipients helped to safeguard the $3.96 billion in ESG-CV funds.  We also independently reviewed nine ESG-CV grantees that relied heavily on subgrantees and received significant pandemic response funding.  We found eight grantees could have improved their subrecipient monitoring, including inadequate or delayed subrecipient monitoring, lack of ESG-CV policies and procedures, and missing required information on agreements.  These three areas were similar to the issues CPD found when monitoring grantees.  CPD and some grantees stated that the pandemic impacted the grantees’ ability to monitor, citing staffing capacity issues due to the increase in CARES Act funding.  In addition, some grantees did not fully understand the ESG-CV subrecipient and contractor monitoring and agreement requirements.  While the issues we found were similar to those identified in CPD’s own monitoring of grantees, they demonstrate the importance of continued monitoring and training by CPD in the area of subrecipient monitoring.  We recommend that the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development take corrective action on subrecipient monitoring and agreement deficiencies cited for the eight ESG-CV grantees and provide additional guidance or technical assistance as needed to ensure that they understand the requirements, and develop and implement additional training and guidance for all ESG grantees.

This report presents the results of our verification inspection of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) corrective actions for the four recommendations from the Office of Inspector General audit report SBA’s Microloan Program (Report 17-19).The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Microloan Program provides loans to nonprofit intermediary lenders (microlenders) that subsequently lend funds, in amounts of $50,000 or less, to small businesses and startups. In fiscal year 2023, microlenders approved microloans totaling $86.4 million for over 5,500 small businesses.We initiated this verification inspection to follow up on the four recommendations and determine whether SBA’s corrective actions are still operating as intended. Accordingly, our objective was to determine the effectiveness of SBA’s actions for 1) improving the information system to include outcome-based performance measurements and ensuring the data captured could be used to effectively monitor Microloan Program compliance, performance, and integrity 2) implementing a site visit plan to comprehensively monitor microloan portfolio performance and ensuring program results could be evaluated program-wide 3) updating SOP 52 00A to clarify requirements regarding evidence for use of proceeds and credit elsewhere and 4) updating the microloan reporting system manual to reflect current technology capabilities.We determined that all four recommendations were implemented and still operating as intended. Additionally, to ensure microlenders comply with program requirements, we suggested SBA review microloan files during annual site visits for proper use of proceeds and no credit elsewhere documentation.