Reports

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.

TIGTA is initiating a review to evaluate the IRS's destruction of unprocessed Tax Year 2019 paper-filed information returns. The overall objective of this audit is to assess the actions taken to mitigate the risk to the IRS and taxpayers associated with the approximately 30 million unprocessed non-ACA information returns destroyed in March 2021.  TIGTA will determine if: (1) the IRS evaluated alternatives to destroying unprocessed Tax Year 2019 information returns and whether the classification of these returns as classified waste is consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policies; (2) followed classified waste processes for the 30 million unprocessed paper-filed information returns that were destroyed; and, (3) assessed and quantified the impact of the destruction of the 30 million paper-filed information returns on taxpayers and its compliance programs.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Board established the MSLP—composed of five different lending facilities—to facilitate lending to small and medium-sized for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Through the MSLP, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is responsible for administering the loans, including assessing overall credit risk and identifying substandard loans. We plan to assess the MSLP’s processes for loan administration, including the design and operating effectiveness of internal controls.

Evaluate controls implemented by the IRS to ensure the $765.7 million in appropriated funds received for its Coronavirus response is adequately tracked and used for its intended purpose. 

The objective of the evaluation is to determine whether the IRS effectively used its telework program to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on IRS operations.

Assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on IRS customer service operations and evaluate the development of the IRS’s comprehensive customer service strategy. 

In response to the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Federal Reserve recently announced that it would create new lending facilities to provide loans to employers, certain businesses, and communities across the country to support the U.S. economy. Specifically, the following programs have been created or are in development: the Main Street Lending Program, the Paycheck Protection Program Liquidity Facility, the Municipal Liquidity Facility, the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility, and the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility. We are initiating an active monitoring effort of these programs to gain an understanding of operational, governance, reputational, and financial matters associated with them. Through this monitoring effort, we will refine our focus on the programs and identify areas for future audits or evaluations. Some of the topics we are considering include the design, operation, governance, and oversight of the lending programs; data collection and reporting associated with the programs; and the effect of the programs on the Board’s supervision and regulation activities.

The OIG plans to initiate a project to research and identify topics for potential audits and evaluations related to the EPA's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

One objective of this audit is to evaluate elements within the System Security Plans to determine whether they provide details to allow the EPA to make decisions to secure its network during the COVID-19 pandemic.