WASHINGTON, DC – A new preliminary report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examining how much federal funding agencies award to ACORN and what oversight federal agencies exercised over funding awards has found that federal agencies have struggled to track ACORN grants and subawards from other organizations that have been awarded federal funding.

“Federal agencies obviously can’t protect taxpayer funds from abuse by ACORN and it affiliates when they can’t even figure out what subawards and grants ACORN has won,” said Oversight Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa. “While GAO has said answers to many large questions will have to wait until it issues its final report, this preliminary report underscores the need for the continuation of the current ban on Federal funding for ACORN and its affiliates. ACORN simply should not receive taxpayer funding as a reward for its criminal activities and illegal partisan political work.”

From pp 9-10 of GAO report:

“Agencies were limited in the extent to which they were able to identify how much funding grantees in turn provided to ACORN or potentially related organizations through subawards, generally because agencies have not collected data on subawards (which would include grants and contracts) that their grantees made, in part because agencies generally have not been required to maintain this information. Therefore, in order to obtain information on the number and amount of any subawards that grantees made, agency officials, for example, would have to be informed by the grantees of the subawards or review hard copy files of their primary grant recipients. Given that agencies can have tens of thousands of primary grant recipients, agency officials said that they do not have the resources to conduct such reviews. Although EPA, Treasury, NEA, and NeighborWorks do not maintain information on subawards, the first three agencies said that they were informed by their grantees of subawards made to ACORN or potentially related organizations because of the funding restriction in the agencies’ respective fiscal year 2010 appropriations statutes. In the case of NeighborWorks, the agency said that it required grantees to provide the names of the subgrantees in the grant application. In another instance, we identified an EPA subaward based on an Internet search.”

The report seconds lack of oversight findings made in a November 2009 Department of Justice IG report , which determined that “DOJ did not conduct any audits, financial reviews, or site visits of the five grants that were awarded to ACORN or its affiliates, either directly or as a sub-award recipient.”

Click here for a copy of the preliminary GAO report.

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