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The Office of Federal Student Aid didn’t put the necessary checks in place to effectively carry out parts of its overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the Education Department’s inspector general found in a new report out Thursday.
The audit focused on how the agency implemented changes related to using federal taxpayer information, which was a key part of the application’s overhaul—not the botched rollout of the FAFSA itself. This was the second review of the agency’s FAFSA planning and implementation, though likely not the last, as both the inspector general and the Government Accountability Office are investigating the troubled launch.
To use and receive tax information from the Internal Revenue Service, the agency had to develop or change several systems. The inspector general found that Federal Student Aid didn’t have processes in place to monitor project costs and budgets or to oversee the contractors working on the project. The agency also failed to properly evaluate risks associated with the project, according to the report. Those failures likely hampered the agency’s ability to properly oversee the project and ensure a timely launch of the application.
In one example, the agency didn’t clearly outline what a contractor was expected to produce as part of its work to “create a secure cloud environment for the applications that manage and store” federal tax information. That contract was the largest of the four reviewed in the audit.
“Consequently, FSA could not hold the contractors accountable for providing the deliverables, even though the contractor was still being paid,” the inspector general wrote.
Additionally, employees at FSA weren’t sure who was responsible for tracking the project’s deliverables and ensuring the contract-monitoring steps and processes were in place.
“Good communication is essential to effective system implementation as FSA identified in its analysis of lessons learned,” the inspector general wrote.
