U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
n	Office of Inspector General	13-P-0351
^	Tj	August 22, 2013
^ At a Glance
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PRO^
Why We Did This Review
On January 29, 2013, the
President signed the Disaster
Relief Appropriations Act,
which provided $50.5 billion in
aid for Hurricane Sandy
disaster victims and their
communities. DRAA required
federal agencies supporting
Sandy recovery to implement
internal controls to prevent
fraud, waste and abuse of
funds. The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency received
nearly $608 million, the bulk of
which was designated for the
Clean Water and Drinking
Water State Revolving Funds.
We sought to determine
whether the EPA has controls
in place for the award and
management of Sandy relief
funds based on lessons from
past reports on the American
Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009.
This report addresses the
following EPA Goals or
Internal Control Lessons Learned for Hurricane
Sandy Disaster Relief Appropriations Act Funds
For further information, contact
our Office of Congressional and
Public Affairs at (202) 566-2391.
The full report is at:
www.epa.gov/oig/reports/2013/
20130822-13-P-0351.pdf
Cross-Cutting Strategies:
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• Protecting America's
o
waters.
o
• Cleaning up communities
o
and advancing sustainable
A
development.
4
5.
What We Found
The Office of Management and Budget provided guidance to federal agencies
supporting Sandy recovery on their submittal of internal control plans by March
31, 2013. We reviewed 72 prior reports on ARRA and found that the following
percent of reports addressed key OMB provisions specifically, addressed multiple
provisions, or addressed no provisions:
¦ Conducting Additional Levels of Review
¦Increasing Monitoring and Oversight of Grant Recipients
Expediting Review and Resolution of Audit Findings
¦Adopting Improper Payments Management Protocol
i Multiple Categories
i No Categories
Source: OIG analysis.
EPA has controls in place to manage Sandy relief funds as described in the
agency's internal control plan (dated March 28, 2013), such as conducting
transaction testing on cash draws; performing semiannual administrative review
of audits; and accelerating resolution of open audits. We identified additional
controls for the agency to consider based on our prior report review:
Strengthen oversight of sub-recipients and develop a checklist that states
can use to help ensure compliance with DRAA.
Work with states to incorporate inspections as part of routine oversight.
Utilize information in recipient monitoring databases to regularly provide
management reports on project progress and status of corrective actions.
Include specific actions to identify states/projects at risk of not meeting
deadlines and establish procedures to assist states with delayed projects.
Update detection and reporting procedures to identify improper grant
payments.
This report makes no recommendations. We encourage the agency to consider
lessons we identified as the EPA moves forward with Sandy recovery activities.
Noteworthy Achievements
The EPA showed foresight to seek a waiver from OMB on expending funds within
24 months given the long-term nature of SRF construction projects. The EPA
also has plans in place to undertake many actions to address our suggestions.

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