The objective of our inspection was to describe FSA’s control activities over institutional processes for completing verification and reporting verification results in accordance with Federal requirements.
We found that FSA implemented five significant control activities over institutional processes for completing verification procedures and reporting verification results. FSA performed ongoing monitoring of one of these control activity; but did not monitor the other control activities on a regular basis. We also found that FSA’s Enterprise Risk Management group issued a document that described its evaluation of the processes FSA had in place to ensure institutions performed verification.We determined that FSA did not address all of the control issues identified in the this document and did not always determine the appropriate corrective actions or complete or document the corrective actions taken.
We made three recommendations. We recommended that FSA (1) establish and operate monitoring activities including ongoing monitoring, separate evaluations, or a combination of the two, to obtain reasonable assurance of the operating effectiveness of FSA’s verification control activities; (2) establish processes to ensure that FSA management evaluates and documents corrective actions, including when corrective actions are not taken, for verification control weaknesses identified by monitoring activities; and (3) for issues identified with its verification control activities in the 2018 Enterprise Risk Management evaluation and other monitoring activities, ensure that FSA management evaluates and documents corrective actions, or if corrective actions are not warranted.
Oversight and Monitoring—Student Financial Assistance Programs
See other OIG reports on Federal Student Aid.