Integrity

Prompted by the suspicious cyber activities on election systems in 2016, Secretary Jeh Johnson designated the election infrastructure as a subsector to one of the Nation’s existing critical sectors. Our audit objective was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Department’s efforts to coordinate with states on securing the Nation’s election infrastructure. DHS has taken some steps to mitigate risks to the Nation’s election infrastructure; however, improved planning, more staff, and clearer guidance could better facilitate the Department’s coordination with state and local officials. Specifically, despite Federal requirements, DHS has not completed the plans and strategies critical to identifying emerging threats and mitigation activities, or established metrics to measure progress in securing the election infrastructure. Senior leadership turnover and insufficient guidance and administrative staff have hindered DHS’ ability to accomplish such planning.

We determined that CBP has made improvements to and continues to develop, its ethics and integrity training for officers and agents.  The agency tracks training completion using various methods and evaluation tools to measure and assess training effectiveness.  As a result, CBP has created, expanded, and redesigned training courses to promote ethics and integrity at the Advanced Training Center, the academies, and in the field.  However, CBP has not effectively communicated or conducted follow up with the field on its overall integrity strategy.  As a result, CBP cannot fully accomplish this important strategy.  We recommended CBP create a repository for the field offices to maintain and share unique field-developed training, highlight the importance of CBP’s integrity strategy throughout the agency and follow up with field staff to ensure it is effectively communicated.  We made two recommendations and CBP concurred with our recommendations, and prior to issuance of the final report took action to close recommendation 2.