Our statutory Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) review sought to (1) assess the completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and quality of the Department’s FY 2020, fourth quarter financial and award data submitted for publication on USASpending.gov and (2) assess the Department’s implementation and use of the Government-wide financial data standards established by the Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The Department submitted data of an Excellent quality based on the Guide’s Quality Assessment Scorecard. However, the Department did not submit certain data completely, accurately, or timely. Specifically, for the 385 sampled transactions, we tested 17,364 individual data elements and identified 679 errors, which resulted in the following error rates: completeness 1.08 percent, accuracy 1.97 percent, and timeliness 1.08 percent. We determined these errors happened due to certain internal control deficiencies over the Department’s DATA Act submissions.
We recommended that the Department (1) implement policies and procedures to confirm the completeness of the data used in their reconciliations, (2) identify alternative methods to conclude on the number of outstanding differences in their reconciliations if the necessary data to conclude is unavailable, and (3) identify a tolerable threshold in which management is comfortable concluding on the validity of the reconciliation.
Data Quality and Reporting
See other OIG reports on the DATA Act.