For one federal agency, 2014 is likely to end the same way the 16 preceding years did: with a 1998 memo from government auditors that identified fraud in the food stamp program — and how the government can stop it — tucked away in a stack of papers, ignored.
Thousands of official recommendations identifying definitive steps to improve government operations — 8,899 of them, to be exact — generated by the nonpartisan auditors at the Government Accountability Office have been ignored by hundreds of agencies, a Washington Examiner analysis of GAO recommendations found. Half of those recommendations have languished for years.
This towering stack of “open recommendations” illustrates that identifying waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government — and how to stop it — is only the beginning of the battle.
It can take much longer, it turns out, to get agencies to do anything about it.
The government has sat on a total of 500 homeland security recommendations, including a 1996 report that called for “immediate action” on “aviation security,” warning that domestic airliners would become targets of terrorism without better passenger screening.
“We face an urgent national problem that needs to be addressed at the highest levels of government now,” the GAO wrote.
But the Federal Aviation Administration failed to respond. “When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information,” the GAO’s status on the report states.
What happened five years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, is history.
GAO’s 1996 report encouraged the FAA to improve airport screenings in ways that were very similar to how U.S. airports ultimately responded to the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The Cabinet-level agency created as a result of those attacks, the Department of Homeland Security, also ignored flaws identified by auditors. In the 12 years since its founding, DHS has accumulated more stale recommendations than any federal agency except the Department of Defense.
DHS has received 325 GAO recommendations that have languished more than two years, and an equal number of newer open recommendations.
“DHS considers all GAO recommendations and actively collaborates at the senior leadership level to fully address their recommendations,” said agency spokeswoman Ginette Magana.
Magana said the number of open recommendations has declined 24 percent in the past two years. DHS auditors are required to follow up on every open recommendation at least once every 90 days, and they have done so 91 percent of the time, she said.
Across government, unaddressed recommendations date back as far as 1982. Fifty-three were identified in the 1980s, 300 in the 1990s, and 682 in the 2000s. There are 3,705 open recommendations dated between 2010 and 2012.
The recommendations contain concrete steps to fix some of the federal government’s most broken sectors, such as information technology, which logged a total 637 proposed reforms. More than 500 open recommendations deal with financial management, and 1,000 deal with national defense, including ways to rein in the Pentagon’s unwieldy accounting systems.
More than 200 agencies have open recommendations from 1,700 GAO reports, many of which are hundreds of pages long.
Following the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security is the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose myriad flaws and institutional resistance to address internal problems were in the spotlight for much of 2014.
The VA has doled out five-figure bonuses annually to high-ranking bureaucrats whose performance is objectively abysmal, and the agency fired only one person since news reports revealed that veterans died awaiting care while bureaucrats falsified wait-list statistics.
But before the VA’s inspector general, Congress and media focused the nation’s attention on flaws in the department’s healthcare program, there was the GAO.
The VA declined to take action on 63 GAO recommendations from 2000 to 2010.
In a 2012 report, years before the issue gained national attention, the GAO wrote: “To ensure reliable measurement of veterans’ wait times for medical appointments, the Secretary of VA should direct the Under Secretary for Health to take actions to improve the reliability of wait time measures.”
That recommendation, along with others dating back to 2004, is still open, according to GAO data.
Close behind the VA in the number of open recommendations are the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services, which administer the largest federal anti-poverty programs.
A 1998 four-state study found 20,000 people were receiving food stamps from multiple states by using false addresses — fraud made possible because USDA had no national system to monitor who was registered in the program.
Some recommendations relate to improving government services, while others show agencies how to recover money owed to the government or how to cut back on wasteful spending.
The IRS has 266 open recommendations dating back to 1991, including some illustrating ways to stop large-scale tax fraud.
The GAO’s oldest open recommendation, from 1982, noted that the Air Force is paying too much overtime because supervisors aren’t able to monitor their employees’ hours effectively.
If a business owner were approached by a third party with access to the business’ internal records and learned that he could recover millions of dollars in missing revenue, he would likely be grateful for the tip, said Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union.
But many federal agencies “treat it as an annoyance,” Sepp said. “Leaving wasted money on the table year after year is a sign of pure disrespect for the people who pay government’s bills.”
Agencies that were indifferent to constructive criticism from the GAO were also reluctant to defend their records to the media.
The departments of Veterans Affairs, Transportation, Energy and Agriculture all declined to respond to questions from the Examiner about why they haven’t acted on so many GAO recommendations.
