Pursuit's Take
The Recovery Act included $200 million in grant funding for FS to implement Wildland Fire Management (WFM) activities on State, county, and private lands.
The grant for one of the projects in our sample was awarded to Colorado State University (CSU). CSU administered the grant for a sub-recipient—a privately-owned saw mill—which was to use the grant funds for meeting labor costs of its employees and temporary workers employed by a staffing company hired by the sawmill.
OIG found that CSU reimbursed the sawmill with grant funds without requesting adequate documentation to show that the sawmill had actually paid the expenses it claimed for reimbursement. As a result, CSU did not detect that the sawmill improperly used $128,610 of reimbursed Recovery Act funds for unauthorized purposes, such as paying for the sawmill’s non-salary costs, or directing funds to an affiliated mill in another State.