Harvey | Office of Inspector General
FEMA Did Not Sufficiently Safeguard Use of Transportation Assistance Funds
FEMA did not take sufficient actions to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse of transportation assistance funds for vehicles considered damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in FY 2017. These weakness occurred because FEMA does not require that agencies collect and retain documentation used to establish applicant eligibility; consider pre-disaster vehicle market value when determining award amounts; provide guidance to state, territorial and tribal governments on how to set transportation assistance thresholds; and conduct post-payment reviews to ensure funds are spent appropriately. We made three recommendations that, when implemented, will help FEMA ensure it is spending Federal funds for transportation assistance properly. FEMA concurred with one recommendation and non-concurred with two recommendations.
Management Alert - FEMA Faces Significant Challenges Ensuring Recipients Properly Manage Disaster Funds
Because of the high dollar amount in disaster funds likely awarded and the history of audit questioned costs for FEMA disaster funds, FEMA’s inadequate grant management poses a significant risk to taxpayer dollars. We identified issues in our previous reports that demonstrate FEMA’s ongoing issues with ensuring disaster grant recipients and subrecipients comply with Federal regulations and FEMA guidelines. Specifically, FEMA faces significant challenges in ensuring its grant recipients properly manage FEMA disaster funds. This alert highlights the significant deficiencies with FEMA’s internal controls and its lack of enforcement of Federal requirements. As FEMA moves forward with its recovery efforts, it must hold recipients accountable for proper grant management. FEMA must implement and use effective controls to overcome existing problems with managing and monitoring funds for disaster response and recovery.
We prepared this special report to address challenges FEMA, Texas, Florida, U.S. territories in the Caribbean, and California may face managing insurance under the Public Assistance program in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, and the October 2017 California wildfires. This report describes lessons learned from findings and recommendations contained in our DHS OIG grant audit reports issued from fiscal years 2013–2017. During fiscal years 2013–2017, we issued 37 Disaster Assistance grant audit reports that disclosed challenges with FEMA’s Public Assistance insurance process. The major recurring challenges we identified included (1) Duplicate benefits in which subrecipients claimed FEMA reimbursement for costs that were covered by insurance; (2) Insufficient insurance in which subrecipients did not obtain and maintain sufficient insurance coverage required as a condition for receiving Federal disaster assistance; and (3) Misapplied or misallocated insurance proceeds in which subrecipients received insurance proceeds, and misapplied or did not allocate those proceeds to FEMA projects.
Public Assistance insurance process
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