Summary

This is a publication by GAO's Inspector General that concerns internal GAO operations. In accordance with Section 5 of the Government Accountability Office Act of 2008 (GAO Act), this is the semiannual report for the first half of fiscal year 2010. During this period, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) continued its efforts to finalize a number of actions to implement requirements contained in the GAO Act and certain provisions in the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008. For example, we substantially revised and strengthened the OIG order to reflect our statutory role and responsibilities and are moving forward to obtain the input and concurrence of other stakeholders, which is an important and necessary step in the process of adopting and implementing the revised OIG order. We also made changes to the OIG Web site and the OIG Hotline in order to improve the visibility of OIG and to enhance GAO employees' understanding of OIG's role, as well as to encourage employees to use the Hotline to report to OIG any situation involving possible wrongdoing at GAO. In addition, we continued to participate in the activities of the broader Inspector General community, including the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency and the Legislative Branch Inspectors General quarterly meetings.

During the reporting period, we issued two audit reports with recommendations and conducted an inspection. The audits evaluated GAO's (1) testimony performance measure1 and (2) information security program and practices for fiscal year 2009. Furthermore, we completed the first phase of our audit of GAO's fiscal year 2009 financial benefit claims of $1 billion or more, which focused on the reasonableness of the amounts claimed. As the Acting Comptroller General requested, we advised him of our results, including that we determined GAO had a reasonable basis to claim these benefits, before the publication of GAO's fiscal year 2009 Performance and Accountability Report--hereafter referred to as the annual performance report. The Inspector General cited this work in her November 5, 2009, memorandum to the Acting Comptroller General, which was published in GAO's annual performance report. Phase two of our financial benefits performance measure work, part of our ongoing work, analyzes the adjustments that GAO made to claimed benefit amounts in response to our audit. Our ongoing work also includes a review examining the effectiveness of agency controls to reduce the risk of employee misuse of government travel cards. We also conducted an inspection of the policies and procedures for conducting investigations used by GAO's Forensic Audits and Special Investigations mission team. We did this inspection to determine whether these policies and procedures are consistent with federal investigation quality standards and were followed for specific investigative work.