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U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	20-P-0006
I	\ Office of Inspector General	October 18,2019
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At a Glance
Why We Did This Project
The Government Charge Card
Abuse Prevention Act of 2012
requires the Inspector General
of each executive agency to
conduct periodic assessments
of its agency's purchase card
and convenience check
program. These assessments:
•	Identify and analyze the
risk of illegal, improper or
erroneous purchases and
payments.
•	Provide a basis for
determining the scope,
frequency and number of
audits of purchase card or
convenience check
transactions.
For this fiscal year 2019 risk
assessment, our objective was
to determine whether the
U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) implemented the
corrective actions identified as
a result of our fiscal year 2018
audit, EPA's Purchase Card
and Convenience Check
Program Controls Are Not
Effective for Preventing
Improper Purchases, Report
No. 18-P-0232, issued
August 20, 2018.
This report addresses the
following:
•	Operating efficiently and
effectively.
Address inquiries to our public
affairs office at (202) 566-2391 or
OIG WEBCOMMENTS@epa.gov.
EPA's Purchase Card and Convenience Check
Program Merits an Audit in Fiscal Year 2020
What We Found
The agency certified that it implemented
corrective actions—including the establishment
of additional internal controls—in response to
our fiscal year 2018 audit of the EPA's purchase
card and convenience check program.
However, some of these internal controls were
not in full effect during the EPA's fiscal
year 2019 transition to a new commercial purchase
assessed that the agency's risk of illegal, improper
high enough to merit an audit in fiscal year 2020.
A longer-than-expected
transition to the EPA's new
purchase card contract
adversely affected the
agency's internal controls
over its purchase card and
convenience check program.
card contract. As a result, we
and erroneous purchases is
The EPA obtains commercial purchase card services from a contractor bank
under the U.S. General Services Administration's SmartPay® Program.
Beginning on November 30, 2018, when a new SmartPay contract took effect,
the EPA transitioned its purchase cards from the previous contractor bank
(J.P. Morgan Chase) to the new contractor bank (Citibank N.A.). Although the
card changeover took place on schedule, other parts of the transition took much
longer than expected due to issues with implementing Citibank's online purchase
card management system, CitiManager®. As a result, EPA cardholders could not
upload supporting documentation for transactions until late April 2019, which
precluded the agency from performing routine transaction testing to verify
compliance with federal and agency acquisition requirements.
In addition to the implementation delays, the EPA did not receive needed training
on CitiManager bank-generated reports until June 2019. In August 2019, more
than 8 months after the transition to the new SmartPay contract, the EPA said
that some cardholders and approving officials still could not fully use the
CitiManager system.
We determined that we need to revisit the corrective actions implemented as a
result of our fiscal year 2018 audit because the EPA's transition to the new
purchase card contract adversely affected the agency's internal controls. We will
therefore conduct a fiscal year 2020 audit of the EPA's purchase card and
convenience check program.
This report contains no recommendations. We issued a discussion document to
the agency on June 25, 2019, and the EPA agreed with proceeding directly to a
final report.
List of OIG reports

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