Ambassador Kennedy used private email, watchdog says

Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and senior staff at the U.S. embassy in Japan used personal email accounts for official business, an internal watchdog report said Tuesday -- making Kennedy the latest Obama administration official to run afoul of email security guidelines.

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) report said it received reports concerning the use of private email accounts for official business, and identified instances where emails labeled "sensitive but unclassified" were sent from or received by personal email accounts. 

“On the basis of these reports, OIG’s Office of Evaluations and Special Projects conducted a review and confirmed that senior embassy staff, including the Ambassador, used personal email accounts to send and receive messages containing official business. In addition, OIG identified instances where emails labeled Sensitive but Unclassified were sent from, or received by, personal email accounts," the report said.

CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT.

The OIG stressed that department policy says employees generally should not use private accounts for official business, citing the risk of hacking and data loss. 

"Employees are also expected to use approved, secure methods to transmit sensitive but unclassified information when available and practical," the report says.

The report, conducted between January and March, comes as the same OIG office reviews email use and policies across the department amid the controversy over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email and server. The FBI is reviewing the security of that server, with questions mounting over whether classified material was improperly shared or stored on the Clintons' private account. 

Email issues aren't confined to the State Department. The IRS admitted Monday to a federal court there was a second personal email account -- set up under the name "Toby Miles" -- that Lois Lerner, the official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal, used to conduct agency business.

But State Department messages can cover a range of sensitive and classified material involving America's allies and enemies. The OIG report does not appear to suggest a serious information breach. Sensitive but unclassified information can be shared outside of the government, though officials are required to use discretion. However, it puts further spotlight on the department's struggle to keep its information secure.

Kennedy, daughter of President John F. Kennedy, has been ambassador to Japan since November 2013.

The report also noted the economic section of the embassy – which works closely with the United States Trade Representative on the Trans-Pacific Partnership – was not maintaining centralized files, and the embassy has not enforced department or federal regulations on managing records.

“Officers have individual files based on their own filing systems, located in personal folders on a shared drive and in Microsoft Outlook email personal folders. These files are not accessible to anyone else and are not archived, retired, or retrievable,” the report said.

Asked about the report, a State Department official told The Associated Press that the embassy in Japan requires the use of official email accounts to conduct official business whenever possible, and indicated that Kennedy and other staff are acting on the inspector's recommendations.

"Ambassador Kennedy uses an official email address for official business. As the report reflects, in the past, like others at the mission, Ambassador Kennedy infrequently used her personal email account for official business," said the department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record and requested anonymity.

"This is allowed, so long as measures are taken to ensure that official records sent or received on personal email are preserved and other requirements are observed. The ambassador and embassy staff are implementing the OIG recommendations, including those regarding emails," the official said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Via: Fox News

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SSA Can’t Collect Overpayments Without Wasting Money

The Social Security Administration (SSA) spends more money than it collects when trying to recover payments to individuals who received benefits for which they were not eligible.

According to the Office of Inspector General (OIG), the SSA issued $128.3 million in “low-dollar” overpayments between 2008 and 2013, and then spent $323 million to collect them. The agency ultimately recovered only $109.4 million.

“This resulted in SSA spending over $213.6 million more than it collected,” the OIG said, in an audit released Wednesday.

The OIG defines an overpayment as “benefit payments greater than the amount to which individuals are entitled.”

The overpayments were distributed through the SSA’s Retirement and Survivors Insurance (RSI), Disability Insurance (DI), and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs. The SSA issued approximately $16.8 billion in disability insurance overpayments alone in the past decade.

“Generally, SSA attempted to collect overpayments regardless of the amount,” the OIG said. “In some cases, the value of the overpayment was less than what SSA spent to collect the overpayment. Therefore, for some overpayments, collection was not always cost-beneficial.”

A “low-dollar” overpayment is less than or equal to the agency’s average cost to retrieve an overpayment.

It cost the SSA an average $164.11 to collect each RSI overpayment, $268.32 for each disability insurance overpayment, and $56.63 for each SSI overpayment in 2013, according to the agency’s Cost Analysis System (CAS).

However, the OIG found errors within the accounting system. The CAS was not able to take into account SSI overpayments that took more than one step to recover. Some overpayments can take as many as five actions by the agency in order to get the money back, costing $283.15 for a single overpayment.

“Therefore, it is not possible to determine how much the average cost to collect an SSI overpayment in CAS is understated when multiple actions are required to collect an SSI overpayment,” the OIG said.

“The time and effort involved to identify an overpayment can vary greatly. Several factors affect how long it can take to identify the correct overpayment amount, such as the reason for the overpayment, how long the overpayment spanned, and whether there are auxiliary beneficiaries eligible on the record that may be affected,” they said.

The audit suggested the SSA could potentially have saved up to $3.2 billion if it was able to divert the millions it spent collecting low-dollar overpayments elsewhere, the OIG said.

The agency uses full medical Continuing Disability Reviews (CDRs) to determine if beneficiaries are in fact still disabled and eligible to receive benefits. By putting the $323 million into processing additional CDRs, the SSA could have reduced its backlog of 1.3 million beneficiaries awaiting reviews in 2013. Each review has a return on investment of $10 for the agency.

“However, the Budget Control Act of 2011 capped the amount of additional new budget authority SSA could use for CDRs and SSI redeterminations for FYs 2012 through 2021,” the OIG said. “Therefore, SSA had limited authority to use these resources for other workloads.”

Via: WFB

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SSA Paid the Dead $46.8 Million Audit:

 Feds paid disability beneficiary representatives long after they died

The Social Security Administration (SSA) paid individuals acting as representatives for disabled beneficiaries nearly $50 million even though they were dead.

An audit from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) is just the latest example of the SSA’s inability to figure out who on their rolls is still alive.

The audit focused on “representative payees,” or a person who manages another’s finances due to mental or physical limitations. The OIG found that many payees acting on behalf of disability beneficiaries had died.

“SSA did not ensure new representative payees were selected when current payees died,” the OIG said. “Based on our sample results, we estimated 2,548 deceased payees received approximately $46.8 million in [Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance] OASDI benefits and [Supplemental Security Income] SSI payments.”

The total amount estimated to be “managed by deceased payees” was $46,886,205.

The majority of payments were made to dead payees who controlled payments to OASDI recipients, which receive an average $1,182.24 per month.

The OIG based its results on a sample of 200 representative payees, finding that 109 were deceased. The average total benefit payment to deceased payees was $15,762. Many received payments more than 2 years after their death.

The SSA is more likely to continue payments to dead payees than to cut them off, according to the OIG estimates. A total of 2,548 deceased payees received payments, while only 2,014 payees were not issued benefit funds after their death.

Though the OIG said a majority of payments to the dead did not show signs of fraud, the report highlights continuing problems with the SSA’s record keeping methods.

Via: WFB

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Amtrak Employees Claimed to Work 40 Hours Per Day

Timesheets for employees of Amtrak are riddled with abuse, according to a recent audit report, with cases of workers claiming over 40 hours of work in a single day.

The audit released by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) Thursday found examples of abuse in the overtime system, which totaled nearly $200 million in overtime pay last year.

“[Calendar Year] CY 2014 timesheet data revealed trends and patterns that indicate potential fraud, waste, and abuse in the reporting of overtime and regular time,” the audit said. “Some of these trends and patterns may be justified because of the complexity of union agreement rules, the nature of jobs, and the functions employees perform.”

“However, our prior investigative work has shown instances in which employees have fraudulently reported hours not worked,” the OIG said. “We believe that these trends and patterns merit further analysis and, if appropriate, action by management.”

One such trend was employees claiming the impossible feat of working 48 hours in a single day.

“Employees reported 1,357 days in which they worked more than 24 regular and overtime hours,” the OIG said. “Ten employees reported working at least 40 hours in a day.”

Of those 10 employees, a serving attendant in the Café Car, who earns an average of $23 an hour, recorded 47.95 hours in one day, 31.01 of which were recoded as overtime.

Numerous employees also claimed to work 20-hour days. There were 1,891 timesheets that recorded a range of 22 to 24 hours in a single day, and 7,145 that listed between 20 and 22 hours in one day.

Another troubling finding that likely indicates abuse of Amtrak’s payroll system was the high number of employees claiming overtime. Some employees reported over 74 hours of overtime on top of a normal 40-hour week. Amtrak’s overtime is paid at either 1.5 or 2 times the hourly rate.

One employee, a locomotive technician, claimed to have worked 130 hours in a single week, with 90 hours of overtime on top of 40 hours of regular time. There are 168 hours in a week.

Via: WFB

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Feds Can’t Verify $2.8 Billion in Obamacare Subsidies

CMS does not know if subsidies went to ‘confirmed enrollees, in the correct amounts’

The federal government cannot verify nearly $3 billion in subsidies distributed through Obamacare, putting significant taxpayer funding “at risk,” according to a new audit report.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) released an audit Tuesday finding that the agency did not have an internal system to ensure that subsidies went to the right enrollees, or in the correct amounts.

“[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] CMS’s internal controls did not effectively ensure the accuracy of nearly $2.8 billion in aggregate financial assistance payments made to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act during the first four months that these payments were made,” the OIG said.

“CMS’s system of internal controls could not ensure that CMS made correct financial assistance payments,” they said.

The OIG reviewed subsidies paid to insurance companies between January and April 2014. The audit found that CMS did not have a process to “prevent or detect any possible substantial errors” in subsidy payments.

The OIG said the agency did not have a system to “ensure that financial assistance payments were made on behalf of confirmed enrollees and in the correct amounts.”

In addition, CMS relied too heavily on data from health insurance companies and had no system for state-based exchanges to “submit enrollee eligibility data for financial assistance payments.”

The government does “not plan to perform a timely reconciliation” of the $2.8 billion in subsidies.

The audit was released as the country awaits a Supreme Court ruling that could make all federal subsidies invalid, since the majority of states did not set up their own health insurance exchange.

Via: WFB

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Nearly $17 billion overpaid in Social Security disability payments

A record number of Americans are receiving Social Security disability benefits and it appears that a lot of the beneficiaries are either ineligible or received overpayments by SSA.
Washington Free Beacon:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) made nearly $17 billion in disability overpayments in the last decade, according to an audit by the Office of Inspector General (OIG).
Some beneficiaries were able to receive disability benefits for 10 years, even though they were ineligible. The OIG based its estimate of $16.8 billion overpayments on a sample of more than 1,500 Americans who received benefits since 2003, finding nearly half were overpaid.
“Our review of 1,532 beneficiaries in current pay status as of October 2003 found that over a 10-year period (from October 2003 through February 2014), SSA assessed overpayments for 44.5 percent of sampled beneficiaries,” the audit said.
“SSA assessed overpayments totaling about $16.8 billion between October 2003 and February 2014 for approximately 4 million beneficiaries who were in current payment status in October 2003,” it said.
The agency was able to recover approximately $8.1 billion, though it is still trying to retrieve $6.3 billion in benefits.
The average beneficiary in the OIG’s sample received improper payments for 14 months. Most earned too much or were able to work, making them ineligible for disability.
The findings included 216,070 payments to fugitives or prisoners, and 209,643 payments to dead people.
Responding to the audit on behalf of the agency, Frank Cristaudo, counselor to SSA Commissioner Carolyn Colvin, disputed that all payments were improper. He said federal law requires the agency to continue paying beneficiaries who may be medically ineligible until after they appeal, a process that can take years.
“We appreciate OIG’s follow-up work from the previous review,” Cristaudo said. “While the report does not contain any recommendations, we suggest some further clarification of the text of the report.”

Via: American Thinker

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ObamaCare Implementation Agency Paid Out $23 Million On Behalf of Dead People

The agency responsible for implementing ObamaCare erroneously paid out millions of dollars on behalf of dead people in 2011, according to a report released Thursday by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) paid $23 million to providers, suppliers, Medicare Advantage organizations and prescription drug plan sponsors on behalf of beneficiaries who died between 2009 and 2011, the OIG found.

That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of total Medicare expenditures, and the report says CMS “has safeguards to prevent and recover” those payments.

The OIG offered a handful of recommendations, such as taking action against providers and suppliers that had high numbers of claims with service dates after a beneficiary’s death, as a way to minimize further inappropriate payments.

CMS said it concurs with all the OIG’s recommendations and is committed to preventing and recovering the payments.

"Agency actions are underway, and in the areas where noted, we are working with law enforcement and other federal agencies, including OIG, to protect the Medicare program, the people using its benefits and services, and using additional resources made available under the Affordable Care Act to detect and prevent fraud from taking place," a CMS representative told The Hill in a statement.

Via: The Hill

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