General Services Administration officials responsible for security at two major federal facilities in Washington, D.C., have no idea who may or may not be going into or out of the facilities, according to a new report by the agency’s Inspector-General (IG).
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The facilities include the Howard T. Markey National Courthouses, in which the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit operate, and the Robert Weaver Building, which houses the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Contractors hired by GSA are working on green building roof conversions for the facilities that are being funded under the agency’s $5.5 billion portion of the 2009 Obama economic stimulus program. The IG said it found security problems at both buildings due to lax management by officials with GSA’s contract management staff.
The problems were particular acute at the Weaver building where the GSA IG said it found “three of the four doors accessing the roof from the building’s interior were propped open and left unattended after business hours. To compound the problem, the security control room monitors for the doors’ surveillance cameras were inoperable.”
That meant “contractor personnel, who were to have restricted access to the building (i.e. escorts and limited access via exterior scaffold stairs), now had unfettered access to the building’s interior.”
In addition, the IG said it found five contractor employees who may not have been given proper background checks and weren’t in GSA’s contractor employee security files. Even worse, the IG said “GSA’s contract and project management staff had no documentation verifying that they had reviewed the status of other contractor personnel.”
You can read the full report here: Recovery Act Report – Contract Administration for Group 10 Review of PBS’s Limited Scope and Small Construction Projects Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – A090184-53.pdf
