Federal Manager's Daily Report

The IG’s office at the EPA has issued a management alert calling for “immediate attention” to the agency’s oversight of waivers of salary overpayments to employees.

The alert, triggered by an ongoing audit of salary overpayments, notes that when the agency’s salary provider–the Interior Department–detects an overpayment, a debt collection notice is to be issued to the employee. However, under certain circumstances, employees can request to have their debt waived, and the EPA then is responsible for reviewing and deciding on that request.

The audit found that some waiver requests forwarded from the payroll provider to the EPA’s office of chief financial officer go missing, adding that several have been outstanding since 2015. That’s due to a lack of accurate and consistent policies and procedures for debt waiver processing and a lack of monitoring and accounting for current agency employee debts.

It said that in response to those findings, the agency has adopted standard procedures for debt waiver requests and a new procedure to record individual accounts receivable.