Federal Reports

This report updates Congress on progress made by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) on the 39 open pandemic-related recommendations referenced in Office of Inspector General (OIG) Report 23-09, COVID-19 Pandemic EIDL and PPP Loan Fraud Landscape.

Over the course of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, SBA disbursed approximately $1.2 trillion of COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Paycheck Protection Program funds. The economic assistance was intended to help eligible small business owners and entrepreneurs adversely affected by the crisis.

In Report 23-09, we estimated SBA disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent loans through its COVID-19 relief programs. To establish this estimate, OIG used investigative casework, prior OIG reporting, and advanced data analytics to identify multiple schemes used by fraudsters to steal from the American taxpayer and exploit programs meant to help those in need.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency in March 2020 through the issuance of OIG’s fraud landscape report in June 2023, OIG issued 77 pandemic-related recommendations to SBA. Of the 77 recommendations, the agency had taken corrective actions to close 38 of them and 39 recommendations remained open as of June 2023. SBA has been working on implementing the corrective actions necessary to close the open recommendations.

The OIG contracted with Sikich CPA LLC to conduct the Performance Audit of the NRC’s Implementation of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 for Fiscal Year 2024 Region III: Naperville, Illinois. The objective was to assess the effectiveness of the information security policies, procedures, and practices of the NRC Region III facility. The findings and conclusions presented in this report are the responsibility of Sikich. The OIG’s responsibility is to provide oversight of the contractor’s work in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.
The agency’s staff indicated that they had no formal comments for inclusion in this report.
For the period March 2024 through November 2024, Sikich found that although the NRC generally implemented effective information security policies, procedures, and practices for Region III, the agency’s implementation of a subset of selected controls was not fully effective. There are weaknesses in Region III’s information security program and practices. As a result, one recommendation was made to assist Region III in strengthening its information security program.

This report presents the results of our audit of Network Changes: Local Transportation Optimization in the Wisconsin region.

The Office of Inspector General completed a final action verification of all 143 recommendations in 12 audit reports on the Food and Nutrition Service’s Summer Food Service Program. 

To see our report, click on the link below