NFIP

Modernization has improved the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA) ability to timely process policies and claims data, enhanced reporting capabilities, and provided more reliable address validation. Despite these improvements, the transition to PIVOT did not resolve longstanding data reliability issues, as FIMA migrated the vast majority of its historical legacy data, including errors, into the PIVOT system. FIMA also deployed PIVOT without adequate controls to prevent potentially erroneous transactions from being recorded in the system. We made three recommendations to improve the quality of data in the modernized NFIP system and educate stakeholders on data quality issues that exist in historical NFIP data. FEMA concurred with all three recommendations.

Since 2017, DHS has continued to make progress in meeting its Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) reporting requirements, but challenges remain.  To enable more effective tracking of Federal spending, DHS must continue to take action to accurately align its budgetary data with the President’s budget, reduce award misalignments across DATA Act files, improve the timeliness of financial assistance reporting, implement and use government-wide data standards, and address risks to data quality.  Without these actions, DHS will continue to experience challenges in meeting its goal of achieving the highest possible data quality for submission to USAspending.gov.  We made five recommendations to help strengthen DHS’ controls for ensuring complete, accurate, and timely spending data.  The Department concurred with all five recommendations.