Federal Manager's Daily Report

The EPA has been responsive to prior findings that it did not timely bill other agencies for services it provided to them on a reimbursable basis, the IG there has said.

Reimbursable interagency agreements are written agreements between federal agencies under which goods or services are provided on a reimbursable basis. A report noted that the EPA during fiscal year 2012 had a backlog of unreimbursed expenses, and had a large balance in federal unbilled receivables—which has been reduced since then from $26 million to $8 million.

It credited process changes in the financial control offices of EPA as well as the hiring of additional staff to reduce the backlog of unbilled expenses it had incurred, such as for oil spill cleanup. EPA also performed and in-depth analysis of the federal unbilled receivable backlog to recover expenses previously considered unbillable, it said.

Attention to interagency billing processes is a growing issue due to the emphasis on shared service agreements.