Reports

What We Looked At The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provided the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with $10 billion in funding, including about $525 million for airport development expenses. FAA distributed these funds through its Airport Improvement Program (AIP), which requires grant recipients to comply with various Federal procurement requirements, including Buy American Preferences. Previous Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits identified weaknesses in FAA’s processes for awarding and administering AIP grants and its oversight of CARES Act funds. Given...

What We Looked At The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) established the Aviation Manufacturing Jobs Protection (AMJP) program in March 2021. To support the program, the ARPA appropriated $3 billion in funding via the Department of Transportation (DOT) through September 2023 for eligible companies engaged in aviation manufacturing and services, maintenance, repair, and overhaul activities. Program funds would allow these companies to continue paying employee wages, salaries, and benefits or rehire employees who were furloughed as a result of the pandemic, and Congress expected DOT to award the...

We audited the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Office of Native American Programs’ (ONAP) coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) recovery programs. We performed this audit to provide HUD with insight and a nationwide perspective on the challenges that grantees experienced with those programs. Our audit objectives were to identify 1) the information, guidance, and training HUD provided to the grantees for the ONAP COVID-19 recovery programs and 2) the challenges that grantees faced in implementing and using program-provided funding. HUD provided information, guidance...

Pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB’s Office of Consumer Response collects, monitors, and responds to consumer complaints on financial services and products. The CFPB uses these consumer complaints to help inform the agency’s supervision activities, enforce federal consumer financial laws, and write rules and regulations. With an increase in consumer complaints as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Consumer Response faces an operational risk with respect to the timeliness in which it can respond to consumer complaints. We plan to assess the effectiveness of the CFPB’s processes for reviewing and responding to consumer complaints. 

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board established the PPPLF to extend credit to financial institutions that originate loans through the U.S. Small Business Administration’s guaranteed Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), taking the PPP loans as collateral. The PPPLF, managed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and operated out of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, distributed billions of dollars to eligible lenders. We will assess the effectiveness of internal controls to (1) determine lender eligibility, extend credit, and process repayments and (2) identify at-risk advances, handle instances of nonpayment, and detect and mitigate fraud. We also plan to assess the extent to which the Federal Reserve System coordinates with the U.S. Small Business Administration to determine lender eligibility, recover losses due to nonpayment, and detect and mitigate fraud.

We audited Nationstar Mortgage, LLC’s (doing business as Mr. Cooper (Nationstar)) compliance with the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) requirements for providing loss mitigation assistance to borrowers after their COVID-19 forbearance ended. We concurrently conducted a nationwide audit of servicers’ compliance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) COVID-19 loss mitigation requirements (HUD Office of Inspector General (OIG) Report 2023-KC-0005). This audit complements that audit by examining how a single provider, Nationstar, provided loss mitigation for...

We performed an audit of loan servicers’ compliance with the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) requirements for providing loss mitigation assistance to borrowers after their COVID-19 forbearance ended. We initiated the audit based on the large number of borrowers exiting forbearance, because the loss mitigation programs available to these borrowers were new and created a risk for both borrowers and the FHA insurance fund when servicers do not properly provide loss mitigation. Our audit objective was to determine whether servicers provided borrowers of FHA-insured loans proper loss...

We audited the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Real Estate Assessment Center’s inspection process. The audit objectives were to determine whether the Center (1) ensured that public housing properties were inspected within required timeframes before the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic; (2) could improve its Big Inspection Plan for inspecting high-priority non-National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate (NSPIRE) demonstration public housing properties; and (3) had experienced delays in inspecting the physical condition of public housing...