Government auditors discovered that a major federal agency did not disclose 99.9 percent of the tax dollars it awarded to contractors.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials failed to disclose as much as $7 billion in spending to the main federal internet website to inform the public about where their tax dollars are going, according to a government watchdog.
“The EPA’s initial reporting of its fiscal year 2022 spending in USAspending.gov was not complete or accurate. This occurred because the EPA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) did not follow its information technology configuration management procedures,” the EPA inspector-general said in a report made public on Jan. 9.
“As a result, the EPA’s fiscal year 2022 award-level obligations were underreported by $1.2 billion, and its fiscal year 2022 award-level outlays were underreported by $5.8 billion. This means that 12.9 percent of the EPA’s total award-level obligations and 99.9 percent of the EPA’s total award-level outlays were not reported in fiscal year 2022. The EPA also did not report any of its Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act outlays and underreported its coronavirus pandemic-related outlays,” the report explains.
The result was that taxpayers were “initially misinformed about the EPA’s spending, and policy-makers who relied on the data may not have been able to effectively track federal spending.”
The agency’s 2023 budget was $10.1 billion, but it also administers more than $27 billion in grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) established by the Inflation Reduction Act. President Joe Biden appointed Michael Regan as EPA administrator in 2021.
The billions in EPA spending weren’t properly reported to USASpending.gov—which documents most federal expenditures and makes that data accessible to anybody with an internet connection—for multiple reasons.
Among those reasons, according to the report, were the failure of EPA officials to implement mandatory digital-spending evaluation and approval system controls, the absence of required digital-error detection procedures needed to confirm accuracy and comprehensiveness, and the fact agency leadership doesn’t require manual checks of the data sent to the website for public transparency.
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