While the Department of Energy is doing an adequate job of detecting improper payments or overpayments to contractors, there is still need for improvement, DOE’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said recently.
During fiscal 2025, DOE’s vetting turned up $53.6 million “of improper payments and unknown payments, which resulted in an improper payment rate of 0.08 percent,” the department’s Office of Inspector General said in an Aug. 11 news release and accompanying report.
The OIG did the report to see how well DOE is implementing Office of Management standards for meeting the 2019 Payment Integrity Information Act , designed to cut down on improper payments by the federal government.
As part of DOE’s compliance efforts, it does an annual financial report and OMB reviews how well DOE did weeding out excess payments.
While DOE’s work meets the essential requirements, there is room for improvement, OIG said. “Specifically, the department: (1) did not ensure that complete and accurate information was reported in its Agency Financial Report; (2) omitted payment reporting sites from its consolidated risk assessment; (3) did not fully complete implementation of suggested root cause determination process improvements; and (4) did not ensure reporting sites were aware of associations between improper payments and mandatory disclosures.”
“As a result of the deficiencies we identified, the department is at risk of misreporting its improper payments, miscalculating its improper payment rate, and misunderstanding its susceptibility to improper payments,” OIG found.
As a result, OIG called upon DOE to implement additional guidance and training and do a better job of addressing root causes.
DOE management concurred “with three of our four recommendations and described proposed actions to address them,” the OIG said in its full 24-page report. DOE management agreed to address most by February 2027.
DOE did not fully concur with OIG’s root cause implementation comments. While DOE said it is committed to “continuous improvement in our payment integrity program” the department must also balance that with its “limited resources” at a time of “unprecedented reduction in staffing.”