The Department of Homeland Security is struggling to account for over a billion dollars it recently spent on training, according to its internal auditor.
The DHS Office of Inspector General said Wednesday that it found “significant discrepancies” between the department’s 2014 training budget and and what it can actually document spending during the fiscal year.
“[I]n FY 2014, Congress provided more than $1.4 billion for DHS training, but DHS only reported $1.9 million in training costs to [the Office of Personnel Management],” the IG report stated. It also said that in August 2015, department officials still hadn’t accounted for how they spent four-fifths of their 2014 training budget—a sum worth more than $1.1 billion.
“DHS does not have reliable training cost data and information to make informed management decisions,” the investigation concluded.
The IG said Homeland Security lacks the data because it can’t directly access relevant records from agencies under its purview—the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and six others. The department “relies solely on contractors to meet its reporting requirements” and uses three of them across the nine agencies to try to keep tabs on training outlays.
The watchdog noted that federal regulations and OPM require the maintenance of accurate records on human resource development, “including payment made for travel, tuition, and fees.” It also noted that DHS has been unable to reproduce accurate information on what it spends on training for well over a decade.
“DHS has not adequately addressed 29 different recommendations to improve training efficiencies made since 2004 by various working groups,” the IG said. The inspector general noted that in recent DHS has previously “made multiple attempts to determine DHS-wide training costs for FYs 2012-14, but the results were unreliable.”
DHS training seeks to improve “preparedness, law enforcement, and leadership development,” the IG noted.
In the wake of August 2014 anti-police brutality demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo. and local law enforcement’s heavy-handed response to them, The New York Times noted that DHS has, since 2003, given billions annually “to states for equipment and training related to anti-terrorism strategies.”
