Skip to main content

Recommendations Database

Jump To:

As of May 31, 2024, there are 5143 open recommendations that still need to be addressed. 418 of these are priority recommendations, those that we believe warrant priority attention. Learn more about our priority designation on our Recommendations page.

Search for open recommendations by agency, topic, subject, or keyword/phrase below, or view all open recommendations by agency.

Clear All Filters
4901 - 4920 of 5143 Recommendations, including 418 Priority Recommendations

401(K) Plans: Greater Protections Needed for Forced Transfers and Inactive Accounts

GAO-15-73
Charles Jeszeck
Show
3 Open Recommendations
Agency Recommendation Status
Social Security Administration To ensure that 401(k) plan participants have timely and adequate information to keep track of all their workplace retirement accounts, the Social Security Administration's Acting Commissioner should make information on potential vested plan benefits more accessible to individuals before retirement. For example, the agency could consolidate information on potential vested benefits, currently sent in the Potential Private Retirement Benefit Information notice, with the information provided in the Social Security earnings and benefits statement.
Open

As of October 2023, SSA continued to disagree with this recommendation. In responding to one suggested way of making information on potential vested plan benefits more accessible to individuals before retirement--namely, including it on the SSA benefits statement, SSA has stated that adding such information would place the agency in a position to respond to issues or questions about ERISA and private pension plans, about which the agency has no firsthand legal or operational knowledge. However, as we acknowledged in our report, the current potential vested plan benefits notice refers those
Department of Labor To prevent forced-transfer IRA balances from decreasing due to the low returns of the investment options currently permitted under the Department of Labor's safe harbor regulation, the Secretary of Labor should expand the investment alternatives available. For example, the forced-transfer IRA safe harbor regulations could be revised to include investment options currently under the qualified default investment alternatives regulation applicable to automatic enrollment, and permit forced-transfer IRA providers to change the investments for IRAs already established.
Open

As of September 2023, DOL had not implemented this recommendation but reported two significant legislative developments relating to the outcome for missing participants' accounts. One development is a requirement to establish a Retirement Savings Lost and Found, which will make it possible for participants to more easily locate their retirement savings when it has been forced out of their former plan. The other development is a new statutory prohibited transaction exemption that will facilitate "automatic portability transactions", which involve automatic transfer of assets held in an IRA
Congress To better protect the retirement savings of individuals who change jobs, while retaining policies that provide 401(k) plans relief from maintaining small, inactive accounts, Congress should consider amending current law to repeal the provision that allows plans to disregard amounts attributable to rollovers when determining if a participant's plan balance is small enough to forcibly transfer it.
Open

As of March 2024, there has been no Congressional action on this recommendation. Although the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 raised the amount of vested savings that could be forced out of a 401(k) plan, it did not address whether or not the definition of vested savings for this purpose would continue to exclude rollovers. We reported that rollover savings are always vested when they are transferred into a plan account, but the law permits plans to ignore rollover savings when calculating the vested balance eligible for forced distribution and transfer. Having embraced new policies around auto

Financial Stability Oversight Council: Further Actions Could Improve the Nonbank Designation Process

GAO-15-51
Lawrance L. Evans, Jr.
Show
2 Open Recommendations
Agency Recommendation Status
Financial Stability Oversight Council To help ensure that FSOC is comprehensively identifying and considering companies, the Secretary of the Treasury in consultation with FSOC members, should establish procedures to evaluate companies in Stage 2 and Stage 3 under both statutory determination standards when an evaluation in either stage concludes that a company does not meet one of the standards, or document--on a company-specific or more general basis--why the second determination standard is not relevant for determination evaluations.
Open

In December 2019, FSOC adopted final interpretive guidance that revises its approach to evaluating and determining whether to designate nonbank financial companies. The final revised guidance prioritizes an activities-based approach to identifying and addressing potential risks to financial stability and states that FSOC will pursue company-specific determinations only if the activities-based approach is not sufficient. The guidance further states that if FSOC does consider a company-specific determination, its evaluation will focus primarily on the first determination standard. The guidance
Financial Stability Oversight Council To help ensure that FSOC is comprehensively identifying and considering companies, the Secretary of the Treasury in consultation with FSOC members, should develop a process to collect information necessary for Stage 1 analysis, as appropriate, from certain nonbank financial companies for which public or regulatory information is otherwise unavailable. For example, FSOC could have companies for which such information is unavailable and that meet certain characteristics (such as quantitative thresholds similar to those used in Stage 1) report necessary information to the Office of Financial Research.
Open

In December 2019, FSOC adopted final interpretive guidance that revises its approach to evaluating and determining whether to designate nonbank financial companies. The final revised guidance introduces a new stage 1 of the designation process in which FSOC would notify a nonbank financial company under review and consider available public and regulatory information. While the guidance states that a company under review in stage 1 may submit information it deems relevant to the evaluation, FSOC would not require the company to submit information during stage 1. We will continue to monitor FSOC

Consumer Product Safety Oversight: Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Coordination and Increase Efficiencies and Effectiveness

GAO-15-52
Alicia Puente Cackley
Show
1 Open Recommendations
Agency Recommendation Status
Congress To improve existing coordination of oversight for consumer product safety, Congress should consider establishing a formal comprehensive oversight mechanism for consumer product safety agencies to address crosscutting issues as well as inefficiencies related to fragmentation and overlap such as communication and coordination challenges and jurisdictional questions between agencies. Different types of formal mechanisms could include, for example, creating a memorandum of understanding to formalize relationships and agreements or establishing a task force or interagency work group. As a starting point, Congress may wish to obtain agency input on options for establishing more formal coordination.
Open

This matter is an action identified in GAO's annual Duplication and Cost Savings reports. As of March 2024, no legislation was identified that would establish a collaborative mechanism to facilitate communication across the relevant agencies and to help enable them to collectively address crosscutting issues, as GAO suggested in November 2014. Some of the agencies with direct regulatory oversight responsibilities for consumer product safety reported that they continue to collaborate to address specific consumer product safety topics. However, without a formal comprehensive oversight mechanism

Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Inconsistent Definitions and Information Limit the Usefulness of Federal Program Inventories

GAO-15-83
J. Christopher Mihm
Show
8 Open Recommendations
8 Priority
Agency Recommendation Status
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to help ensure that the information agencies provide in their inventories is useful to federal decision makers and key stakeholders, and to provide greater transparency and ensure consistency in federal program funding and performance information, revise relevant guidance to direct agencies to identify in their inventories the performance goal(s) to which each program contributes.
Open

As of July 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to help ensure that the information agencies provide in their inventories is useful to federal decision makers and key stakeholders, and to provide greater transparency and ensure consistency in federal program funding and performance information, ensure, during OMB reviews of inventories, that agencies consistently identify, as applicable, the strategic goals, strategic objectives, agency priority goals, and cross-agency priority goals each program supports.
Open

As of July 2021, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, revise relevant guidance to direct agencies to collaborate with each other in defining and identifying programs that contribute to common outcomes.
Open

As of July 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, revise relevant guidance to provide a time frame for what constitutes "persistent over time" that agencies can use as a decision rule for whether to include short-term efforts as programs.
Open

As of July 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, define plans for when additional agencies will be required to develop program inventories.
Open

As of July 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory effort by designating tax expenditure as a program type in relevant guidance.
Open

No executive action has been taken. As of March 2024, OMB had not taken action to include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory, as GAO recommended in October 2014. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 required OMB to publish a list of all federal programs on a central, government-wide website (31 U.S.C. ? 1122(a)(2)). Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to better present a more coherent picture of all federal programs, include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory effort by developing, in coordination with the Secretary of the Treasury, a tax expenditure inventory that identifies each tax expenditure and provides a description of how the tax expenditure is defined, its purpose, and related performance and budget information.
Open

No executive action has been taken. As of March 2024, OMB had not taken action to include tax expenditures in the federal program inventory, as GAO recommended in October 2014. The GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 required OMB to publish a list of all federal programs on a central government-wide website (31 U.S.C. ? 1122(a)(2)). Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014
Office of Management and Budget
Priority Rec.
To ensure the effective implementation of federal program inventory requirements and to make the inventories more useful, the Director of OMB should, to help ensure that the information agencies provide in their inventories is useful to federal decision makers and key stakeholders, and to provide greater transparency and ensure consistency in federal program funding and performance information, revise relevant guidance to direct agencies to consult with relevant congressional committees and stakeholders on their program definition approach and identified programs when developing or updating their inventories.
Open

As of July 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had taken limited action in response to this recommendation. Although OMB published an initial inventory covering the programs of 24 federal agencies in May 2013, OMB decided to postpone further development of the inventory in order to coordinate with the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act). In January 2021, Congress amended and expanded requirements for the federal program inventory as part of the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021. In

Health Care Transparency: Actions Needed to Improve Cost and Quality Information for Consumers

GAO-15-11
Linda Kohn
Show
4 Open Recommendations
Agency Recommendation Status
Department of Health and Human Services To improve consumers' access to relevant and understandable information on the cost and quality of health care services, the Secretary of HHS should direct the Administrator of CMS to include in the CMS Compare websites, to the extent feasible, estimated out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries for common treatments that can be planned in advance.
Open – Partially Addressed

As of August 2023, CMS has added some cost information to its Care Compare websites. For example, CMS Care Compare indicates which doctors and clinicians accept the Medicare-approved amount as payment, which results in lower out-of-pocket costs for patients. In addition, CMS established a separate website with national average Medicare and patient costs for some medical procedures. However, the websites do not include estimated out-of-pocket costs for consumers. Without estimated out-of-pocket costs, consumers lack information to help them understand and plan for the costs of their treatment
Department of Health and Human Services To improve consumers' access to relevant and understandable information on the cost and quality of health care services, the Secretary of HHS should direct the Administrator of CMS to organize cost and quality information in the CMS Compare websites to facilitate consumer identification of the highest-performing providers, such as by listing providers in order based on their performance.
Open – Partially Addressed

As of August 2023, CMS's Compare websites have some additional features that allow consumers to sort the lists of providers to generally identify higher performing providers, such as by hospitals or nursing homes with the highest overall star ratings. However, consumers are unable to identify or sort providers by specific performance measures that may be important to individual patients. Without the ability to sort providers for specific performance measures, consumers will not be able to identify the highest-performing providers for their treatments.
Department of Health and Human Services To improve consumers' access to relevant and understandable information on the cost and quality of health care services, the Secretary of HHS should direct the Administrator of CMS to include in the CMS Compare websites the capability for consumers to customize the information presented, to better focus on information relevant to them.
Open – Partially Addressed

As of August 2023, CMS's Compare websites have some additional features that allow consumers to filter the list of providers by certain characteristics, such as whether physicians and clinicians provide telehealth services or are affiliated with particular hospitals. Consumers can also select up to three providers for side-by-side comparison. However, the inability to filter on individual quality measures prevents consumers from customizing the information to focus on information relevant to them.
Department of Health and Human Services To improve consumers' access to relevant and understandable information on the cost and quality of health care services, the Secretary of HHS should direct the Administrator of CMS to develop specific procedures and performance metrics to ensure that CMS's efforts to promote the development and use of its own and others' transparency tools adequately address the needs of consumers.
Open

As of August 2023, CMS has stated that it uses Objectives & Key Results to measure performance, but it had not provided details such as what measures are used, or how the measures show whether transparency tools address the needs of consumers. Without specific procedures and performance measures, CMS lacks a way to ensure that its transparency tools address the needs of consumers.

Individual Retirement Accounts: IRS Could Bolster Enforcement on Multimillion Dollar Accounts, but More Direction from Congress Is Needed

GAO-15-16
James (Jay) R. McTigue, Jr, Charles Jeszeck
Show
2 Open Recommendations
Agency Recommendation Status
Congress To promote retirement savings without creating permanent tax-favored accounts for a small segment of the population, Congress should consider revisiting the use of IRAs to accumulate large balances and consider ways to improve the equity of the existing tax expenditure on IRAs. Options could include limits on (1) the types of assets permitted in IRAs, (2) the minimum valuation for an asset purchased by an IRA, or (3) the amount of assets that can be accumulated in IRAs and employersponsored plans that get preferential tax treatment.
Open – Partially Addressed

No legislation enacted limiting retirement account owner accumulations, as of March 2024. The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, enacted in December 2019 as division O of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2020, amended a number of requirements related to retirement accounts (Pub. L. No. 116-94, 133 Stat. 2534, 3137). Section 401 limits inherited beneficiaries' ability to continue tax deferral to 10 years beyond the account owner's death. This provision somewhat reduces the long-term financial benefits of accumulating large balances in IRAs. However
Internal Revenue Service To help taxpayers better understand compliance risks associated with certain IRA choices and improve compliance, the Commissioner of Revenue should, building on research data on IRAs holding nonpublic assets, identify options to provide outreach targeting taxpayers with nonpublic IRA assets and their custodians, such as reminder notices that engaging in prohibited transactions can result in loss of the IRA's tax-favored status.
Open – Partially Addressed

IRS had taken some action to provide general outreach. In June 2016, IRS published information on IRS.gov outlining the new information to be reported for nonmarketable IRA assets and included a general caution that IRAs with nonmarketable investments or assets under direct taxpayer control may be subject to a heightened risk of committing prohibited transactions. This caution is similar to those that IRS added to its publications about IRA contributions and distributions. It is a step toward helping taxpayers better understand which investments pose greater risks. In February 2018, IRS
Note: the list of open recommendations for the last report may continue on the next page.

Have a Question about a Recommendation?

For questions about a specific recommendation, contact the person or office listed with the recommendation. For general information about recommendations, contact GAO's Audit Policy and Quality Assurance office at (202) 512-6100 or apqa@gao.gov.