FIMA Made Progress Modernizing Its NFIP System, but Data Quality Needs Improvement
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.