GAO: Remedial training for guards — mostly contractors, not federal employees — who had failed to detect items in the FPS testing was inconsistent and sometimes did not directly address the reason for the lapse. Image: Sucharn Wetthayasapha/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffSecurity guards prevented some 750,000 banned items from being taken into federal buildings over fiscal 2020-2023, says a GAO report that meanwhile however suggests that an equal or higher number may have gone undetected.
The report fleshes out a preliminary version issued last year—and which the GAO cited in recent House testimony—in which guards failed to catch prohibited items such as knives in 14 of 27 undercover tests by GAO employees. That however included little information on undercover tests conducted by the Federal Protective Service itself, other than to say that those test results were consistent with GAO’s own.
The new report shows that the FPS conducted more than 500 such tests during that timeframe, repeated that the detection rate was consistent with GAO’s test rate, and revealed the number of detected items.
It added that FPS’s data on its test results “are often inconsistent, inaccurate, and not reliable” including regarding why prohibited items were not detected. In reviewing a sample, GAO found that four-fifths were attributed to “human factor”—which it called “too broad to identify the underlying cause of the failure or to pinpoint proactive steps that could prevent similar failures in the future.”
Further, remedial training for guards—the large majority of whom are contractor employees, not federal employees—who had failed to detect items in the FPS testing was inconsistent and sometimes did not directly address the reason for the lapse.
As it had in the prior report and in the recent testimony, the GAO criticized as “beset with problems” a tracking system installed in 2018 to improve oversight of contract guards. That has resulted, it said, in the SSA and the IRS having to close field offices in more than 500 instances since 2022 because the system did not signal an alert in advance to shortages of guards.
The report said FPS’s parent DHS agreed with recommendations to FPS to collect and use better covert testing data and determine whether to replace the tracking system.
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