Well, not exactly. But the Government Accountability Office has set up a hotline to track stimulus fraud, and the agency is asking everyone — feds, contractors and private citizens — to report waste and abuse. GAO is one of the agencies tasked with overseeing billions of dollars in stimulus spending, which would be a difficult task even if the agency had no other responsibilities. “The public can help to identify improper activities or weaknesses in programs that warrant scrutiny,” said Gene Dodaro, the acting comptroller general. Here’s the contact information for FraudNet, GAO’s new hotline: By phone: 1-800-424-5454 By fax:…
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There is widespread fraud in the Small Business Administration’s Historically Underutilized Business Zone (HUBZone) Program, the Government Accountability Office has found. In a review of 36 contracts awarded in four cities, GAO found that 19 firms claiming to be HUBZone eligible didn’t meet the qualifications for the program that is meant to benefit small businesses in severely economically depressed areas. The firms didn’t have their principal offices in HUBZones or didn’t meet the requirement mandating a certain percentage of employees live in the HUBZone. The result: the firms fraudulently obtained more than $30 million in HUBZone contracts in fiscal 2006…
The Government Accountability Office issued a blunt assessment of the Defense Department’s grip on its acquisition workforce needs today. Its opening line: DoD lacks critical departmentwide information to ensure its acquisition workforce is sufficient to meet its national security mission. And its second line: In its acquisition workforce assessments, DoD does not collect or track information on contractor personnel, despite their being a key segment of the total acquisition workforce. Followed closely by: DoD also lacks information on why contractor personnel are used, which limits its ability to determine whether decisions to use contractors to augment the in-house acquisition workforce…
The Government Accountability Office has a new report out on the Food and Drug Administration: Apparently the agency doesn’t have enough information about the ingredients in dietary supplements to decide if they’re safe. ..a lack of information is one of the most significant factors that limit the FDA’s ability to identify and properly act on safety concerns regarding dietary supplements and foods with added dietary ingredients. I think there’s an important point to draw from this report. We talk a lot about the FDA’s budget and staffing woes. And the agency is certainly underfunded — you can’t expect the FDA…
The Government Accountability Office is warning the Transportation Security Administration that the agency’s 2007 study on the efficiency and effectiveness of private screeners doesn’t tell the whole story. In 2007, TSA studied the cost, wait time in security lines, customer satisfaction, threat detection capabilities and recertification test passage rates of private security screeners at six of the nation’s airports and compared the results to federal screeners. A newly released GAO report reviews a TSA assessment of cost savings and performance of private screeners and found the agency didn’t account for all costs in its study, which found private screeners were equal to…
We’ve written before about the lack of oversight in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Things have improved a bit — the special inspector general, Neil Barofsky, seems extremely capable, and President Obama has promised more transparency — but we still don’t know much about how companies are spending money received through TARP. But there’s news of another encouraging step, a bill introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Max Baucus, D-Mont.: The bill introduced today – the Troubled Asset Relief Program Enhancement Act – would require any private entity that receives federal funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)…
The biennial Government Accountability Office high-risk list was released today, and it’s good news for the Federal Aviation Administration — it’s been removed from the list, where it’s languished since 1995. Everybody else, not so much. The list is up to 30 agencies and programs, including three additions this year: the federal financial regulatory agencies (shouldn’t this have been on here a few years ago?), the Food and Drug Administration’s medical products oversight and the Environmental Protection Agency’s processes for assessing, cataloguing and controlling toxic chemicals. Take a look at the list here. Then come back and tell us what…
Sixty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. federal contractors have subsidiaries in tax havens, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. A tax haven is a country with no or low taxes where companies set up subsidiaries in order to reduce their tax burdens to the United States. Many of the tax havens cited in the GAO report are Caribbean countries, such as Barbados, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. Four contractors had more than half of their foreign subsidiaries in jurisdiction listed as tax havens. One contractor, Proctor and Gamble, has 83 off-shore subsidiaries in tax haven countries.
The reviews are in for ABC’s new reality show “Homeland Security USA,” and they are not kind. The “COPS”-like docudrama program, which follows real Border Patrol agents, Customs and Border Protection officers and transportation security officers at their jobs, is being called little more than a recruitment video for the Homeland Security Department. The New York Times said that the show doesn’t even touch on many issues challenging the department, such as mismanagement, privacy concerns, or corruption. Instead, “Homeland Security USA” shows Customs officers searching through a belly dancer’s skimpy outfits. Critics say the show’s substance-free exchanges, along with heart-tugging voice…
Contractor protests of government contract awards rose 17 percent in 2008, according to a Government Accountability Office report released last week. GAO received 1,652 cases in 2008, up from 1,411 in 2007. At least some of the increase is due to GAO’s expanded jurisdiction over orders placed under existing multi-vendor contracts, public-private competition decisions and Transportation Security Administration contracts. These new areas of authority brought in 87 cases to the office this year. If these cases are excluded from the calculations, protests only increased 11 percent in 2008, GAO said. We reported in September that protests of competitive sourcing decisions…