Pursuit's Take
Every year the Department of Justice (DOJ) awards billions of dollars in grants and cooperative agreements. This report focuses on the years 2008 – 2016. The DOJ gave over 43,000 awards totaling $26 billion during this time period. According to the report, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that “82 percent of the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) awards, 99 percent of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) awards, and 87 percent of the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) awards were closed after the allowable 180-day timeframe,” however, in this report, OIG “determined that 13 percent of OJP awards, 19 percent of COPS Office awards, and 42 percent of OVW awards were closed after 180 days.” A significant improvement.
In addition, in OIG’s 2006 report, OIG identified over $550 million in award recipient drawdowns that were made after the expiration of the award liquidation deadline. OIG was pleasantly surprised to find that awarding agencies had implemented controls to prevent those types of drawdowns form occurring.
“However, this report identified $28,810,221 in obligated funding for awards that were eligible for closeout, including $1,465,592 in OJP and OVW funding obligated to organizations that had not been operational for as many as 10 years. Also included in this amount was nearly $4 million in unused OJP, COPS Office, and OVW funding that was obligated for awards that expired as many as 6 years ago, and over $1 million in refunds submitted by recipients as many as 5 years ago that the awarding agencies had not deobligated.”
Further, OIG questioned $760,107 in remaining costs. Including “over $19,000 spent to bring six youths and five chaperones on a cultural exchange to Hawaii – a rather high chaperone to youth ratio.”
The Difference A Decade Makes, 2006 vs 2018