Contract management and oversight of the Department of Homeland Security’s visitor and immigrant status program needs to be strengthened, the Government Accountability Office has said.
It said the multi-billion dollar program to control and monitor the movement and status of foreign visitors in the country relies extensively on contractors, but that contracts have not been effectively managed or monitored.
US-VISIT manages some, as do Customs and Border Protection and other agencies such as the General Services Administration, but GAO said effective financial controls were not in place on any of the contracts it reviewed.
While the program office established and implemented non-financial controls for contracts it managed directly, such as verifying that deliverables satisfied requirements, it did not implement effective controls for overseeing its contracts managed by other DHS agencies and by non-DHS agencies, according to GAO-06-404.
It said the program office did not know the full extent of contract actions nor did it perform key non-financial practices associated with understanding contractor performance in meeting contract terms.
Other agencies — managing 56 percent of contract obligations — did not always establish and implement effective controls for managing contracts either, including financial controls, the report said.
It said that agencies were unable to report contracting expenditures reliably as a result, and that the program office and these other agencies improperly paid and accounted for related invoices, including making duplicate payments and payments for non-US-VISIT services with funds designated for US-VISIT.
