The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said it has sustained clean financial statements for the second consecutive year based on an unqualified audit opinion by the accounting firm KPMG in conjunction with the department’s Inspector General (IG).
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement regarding the accuracy of his department’s financial statement that “For the third largest department of our government, only 11 years old, and consisting of 22 components, 240,000 personnel, a $60 billion budget, and six core financial systems and hundreds of feeder systems, I consider this a remarkable achievement.”
Yet the IG office’s report on Monday also says its FY ’14 audit revealed continued shortcomings in “foundational documents and management controls necessary to manage risks and measure performance” of acquisition programs. It says a key management office, the Office of Program Accountability and Risk Management (PARM), has been unable to schedule regular meetings of the Acquisition Review Board even though it has oversight of the acquisition programs of the department and its components.
Even though the IG made a recommendation in May 2013 that the PARM apply life cycle requirements to strategic air and marine programs and projects within Customs and Border Protection’s, the recommendation still had not been implemented by the end of FY ’14, it says.
The IG’s office also says its FY ’14 audit revealed “several programs with weak department-level oversight,” noting that in its examination of readiness for pandemics “DHS did not effectively manage its stockpile of pandemic equipment and antiviral medications.”
The report also says that DHS’ inventories of supplies at component offices for responding to pandemics are inaccurate and “As a result, the Department has no assurance it has sufficient equipment and medical countermeasures to respond to a pandemic.”