| This
Semiannual Report to Congress summarizes the activities and
accomplishments of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
(PBGC) Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the period October
1, 2004, through March 31, 2005. When accomplishing audit and
investigative work, we ensure that it accords with our mission
to be an “independent and objective voice for Congress,
the Board of Directors, and PBGC.” We want to focus our
work on the challenges facing PBGC and to be a primary source
of timely and objective information for the organization. We
will accomplish our work demonstrating our values of respect,
excellence, and integrity.
During this period, we conducted work in all
areas designated as Management
Challenges, focusing much of our audit effort on the financial
statement audit and its related reports, and contract audits.
- Governance—The
Board of Directors, PBGC executives and the OIG have
taken many positive steps to strengthen the oversight of
PBGC, but additional
improvements are needed (see page 5).
- Financial
management—we issued the 12th consecutive unqualified
audit
opinion, internal control opinion and report on laws and
regulations compliance, related financial reports required
by the Department of Treasury, a management letter for financial
issues and one for information technology issues, and sponsored
lessons learned sessions after the financial statement audit
was completed (see page 6).
- Information
technology—we continued our work with PBGC in areas
to
improve for Federal Information Security Management Act
(FISMA) reporting and continuity of operations, and provided
to management a benchmarking study of other agencies’
e-mail retention policies (see page 10).
- Procurement
and contracting—we audited contracts with a total
cost of $13.3
million and identified about $663,000 of questioned and
unsupported costs,
initiated a multi-phase contract audit and began an audit
of PBGC’s procurement function (see page 12).
- Program
performance—we completed field work for evaluations
of the purchase card program and accounts payable (see page
14).
In the
investigative area, we received a large number of allegations,
many or which
we were able to close during the inquiry stage. We opened
11 new cases, and closed 20 cases and 40 inquiries. Significant
investigative work this period included:
- Stolen
PBGC laptop computers were recovered, resulting in three
convictions
(see page 17);
- PBGC
contractors were disciplined for misusing PBGC computers
and e-mail to view and share pornography (see page 17);
- Persons
who engaged in pension benefit fraud were convicted and
ordered to
pay restitution, and matters were referred to PBGC for collection
activities (see page 18); and
- More
than $8,000 was recovered as a result of criminal prosecutions
(see page 19).
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