The Big Picture The federal crop insurance program offers subsidized crop insurance to protect farmers against financial losses from crop price declines and poor harvests due to natural causes. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2022 the program supported about 1.2 million policies...
What GAO Found While fraud and accountability issues will continue to occur in COVID-19 relief programs, there is already ample evidence of widespread fraud, improper payments, and accountability deficiencies during the pandemic. For example, GAO found that from March 2020 through January 13, 2023, at...
What GAO Found During a May 2022 GAO-hosted forum, federal human capital officers called 1) recruiting and hiring, and 2) workforce planning their agencies' top challenges for closing skills gaps. In addition, forum participants said that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) could help them close...
What GAO Found When hiring new clinical staff for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) medical facilities, certain onboarding tasks are required, such as verifying clinical staff's credentials or checking fingerprints for a criminal history. In an effort to bring staff onboard quickly during the pandemic,...
What GAO Found The Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) legacy IT environment includes applications, software, and hardware, which are outdated but still critical to day-to-day operations. Specifically, GAO's analysis showed that about 33 percent of the applications, 23 percent of the software instances...
What GAO Found In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, agencies obtained information on potential threats from various sources including investigations, open sources, and social media tips. All 10 federal agencies GAO reviewed identified potential threats of violence, and two—the FBI and the Capitol...
Overview We have made 236 recommendations in public reports since 2010 with respect to protecting cyber critical infrastructure. Until these are fully implemented, federal agencies will be more limited in their ability to protect private and sensitive data entrusted to them. For more information on this...
What GAO Found GAO found evidence of substantial levels of fraud and potential fraud in unemployment insurance (UI) during the pandemic. GAO estimated over $60 billion in fraudulent UI payments by extrapolating the lower bound of the Department of Labor's (DOL) 2021 estimated national fraud rate for...
What GAO Found To operate as effectively and efficiently as possible, Congress, the administration, and federal managers must have ready access to reliable and complete financial and performance information—both for individual federal entities and for the federal government as a whole. GAO's report...
What GAO Found Little research exists detailing the effects of the Department of Defense (DOD) child care program on young children's learning and development outcomes. Broader child care research, however, suggests that quality child care is tied to positive outcomes for children, including improved...