Activities of the Department of State's Office of the Inspector General : hearing before the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, October 31, 2007.
GAO was asked to review the Department of State Office of Inspector General (State IG) including its (1) organization, budget levels, and accomplishments; (2) audit and inspection coverage of the department; (3) role of inspections in the oversight of the department; (4) quality assurance process including assurance of independence; and (5) coordination of State IG investigations with the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. GAO obtained information from State IG reports, interviews, and documentation for a sample of inspections.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent agency that works for Congress. The GAO watches over Congress, and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayers dollars. The Comptroller General of the United States is the leader of the GAO, and is appointed to a 15-year term by the U.S. President. The GAO wants to support Congress, while at the same time doing right by the citizens of the United States. They audit, investigate, perform analyses, issue legal decisions and report anything that the government is doing. This is one of their reports.
In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the operations of the Department of State's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to determine how differences between its authorizing legislation, the Foreign Service Act of 1980, and the Inspector General Act affect the State OIG work. GAO found that the Foreign Service Act included several important differences from the basic Inspector General Act, which permit the new State OIG to continue to operate like old OIG rather than functioning like the new independent statutory OIG established in other agencies. GAO believes that more independence is needed in the State OIG, because it found a number of situations in which the independence of the State Inspector General (IG) inspection, audit, and investigative functions could have been impaired. In addition to doing traditional audit functions, OIG is required to inspect and audit each foreign post and domestic unit at least once every 5 years. GAO believes that management, not OIG, should be responsible for these routine inspections. The role of the independent audit organization should be to evaluate how well agency management is carrying out its basic responsibilities, including its routine monitoring and assessment functions. In addition, GAO found that OIG has little operational control over investigations into allegations of fraud, waste, and abuse. It relies on the Office of Security to conduct these investigations. GAO believes that this constitutes an organizational impairment which has caused delays and a poorer quality of investigations. Finally, GAO found that government audit standards are not being complied with and that the quality of OIG work has suffered due to the lack of staff training and experience, severe time constraints, and the lack of documentation.
