Government Paid $13.6 Million to Hire Two Border Guards

Boarder patrol positions have been notoriously difficult to fill, in large part, because of the polygraph exam applicants are required to undergo. It must be a rigorous polygraph because two of three applicants fail the exam.

To assist in hiring border guards, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) awarded Accenture Federal Services a five year contract for nearly $300 million to to recruit and hire 7.500 Boarder Patrol Agents. Now, 10 months into the contract, CPB has paid Accenture $13.6 million and what do they have to show for their efforts? Accenture has filled 2 positions (or $6.8 million per recruit).

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Inspector General (OIG), initiated its audit of Accenture's performance after receiving "Hotline" complaints about the contractor's performance. The OIG's report, issued last week, found numerous problems and concluded that CBP management needed to address "serious performance issues on the Accenture hiring contract.".

Among the performance issues identified by the OIG are

• Accenture has not provided the promised hiring process or results. Accenture has yet to demonstrate the efficient, innovative, and expertly run hiring process it promised.
• Accenture relied on CBP resources to fulfill contract obligations. Accenture was supposed to provide a team of technical experts and tools to fulfill contract requirements. Instead, Accenture relied heavily on CBP resources to complete the hiring process.
• Accenture has not provided the agreed-upon technological innovations.
• Accenture used a retinal scanning tool to discern deception based on eye and face muscle movement to pre-screen candidates without regulatory approval.

The OIG made a series of recommendations which CPB concurred to.

The full report can be accessed here.

New Website Consolidates All Inspector General Reports

Last month, the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) launched a new website called oversight.gov which will be a central repository for OIG (Office of Inspector General) reports authored by participating OIGs. These reports will go back 17 years to 2000 and will consist of audits, investigations, semiannual reports, and other reviews.

Participation in Oversight.Gov is not required. So far only 36 of the 73 Federal OIGs are participating. The Inspectors General Act of 1978 requires all OIG audit, evaluation, and inspection reports be made available to the public by posting them to individual OIG websites. However, you can imagine the difficulty of searching 73 different websites to find something. Each website is different and many lack a keyword search function. Additionally, it would be difficult to compare report findings and recommendations across OIGs for similar issues such as agency compliance with the Improper Payments Act that we've discussed on this blog a few times.

As of today, the new website reports 3,770 reports have been upload to this website, about half related to audits. There are graphical representations on the potential savings by year and the number of OIG recommendations by year. There is even a "button" to click if you want to report fraud, waste, and abuse.

Government contractors are required to post information in readily available locations informing employees on how to report fraud, waste, and abuse and "hotline" phone number of the applicable Federal OIG. For contractors that have contracts from multiple agencies, it might be useful to point employees to this website and let the Government try to figure out which OIG should lead the investigation.

We're not certain how well the search function works. Typing in "DCAA" yields one result, typing in "Defense Contract Audit Agency" yields three results, typing in "DCMA" yields no results, and typing in "Defense Contract Management Agency" yields five results. Certainly there have been more reports covering the activities of these two Agencies over the past 10 years.

While the search functionality of Oversight.gov didn't provide robust results, a reader passed along this technique for searching the website. We appreciate the tip.

With regards to your search, from my limited “testing” the search function only looks at the title of the report.  I found that out when looking for reports regarding DCAA on the DoD IG’s website.  The way around this is our friend Google.  If you go to google and put the following in the search box:

site:oversight.gov/ "defense contract audit agency"
 Using this search term returns 77 results for “oversight.gov” with DCAA mentioned.  Putting “defense contract audit agency” in quotation marks returns only those results with that phrase.  You don’t have to capitalize google search terms.  If you want just PDF files use the following:              site:oversight.gov/ "defense contract audit agency" filetype:pdf This returns 71 PDFs with "defense contract audit agency" mentioned.
 Using Google to search the DoD IG’s website using site:www.dodig.mil/pubs/ "defense contract audit agency" filetype:pdf returns 189 results whereas searching defense contract audit agency on the DoD IG site returns approximately 50 hits.
 You can use the same approach for dcma.mil, dcaa.mil, etc.  I recommend searching with and without the www in front of the address.  If something is buried in a subdomain it won’t be returned in the results.  For example, if DoD IG had subdomains for audits (audits.dodig.mil) and another for misc (misc.dodig.mil) then searching for www.dodig.mil won’t return audits and misc subdomains.