The National Institute of Justice has a process in place to determine DNA and forensic program funding priorities, but its decisions regarding these priorities are not clearly documented, GAO has said.
NIJ explained that the rationale for funding the DNA Backlog Reduction Program versus other initiatives as documented in briefing slides, but according to GAO those documents do not show NIJ’s rationale for how funding priorities are determined.
Congress has appropriated over $100 million every year to the Department of Justice for use on initiatives including reducing DNA backlogs and enhanced crime laboratory capacity, GAO noted.
However, without a clearly documented process that demonstrates the rationale for NIJ’s annual funding priorities, there is limited transparency regarding how and why the agency is allocating funding, according to GAO-13-605.
It said the agency could verify data and revise its performance measures to better assess DNA backlog efforts, adding that while the NIJ assess reports submitted by grantees every twice a year, it lacks an approach to verify the reliability of the data.
The agency agreed to document the rationale for annual funding priorities, develop a cost-effective approach to verify the reliability of grantee performance data, and revise its performance measure to reflect actual completed cases.
