The OIG conducted an inspection of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) ethics program to determine whether USGS appropriately managed its financial disclosure filings and ethics training program. Our inspection revealed several concerns regarding financial disclosure filings, ethics training, and other operational inefficiencies.
We found that USGS inconsistently applied the criteria for confidential financial disclosure filings and did not disseminate financial guidance to employees in a timely manner. We also found that most USGS employees do not receive annual ethics training, and several confidential financial disclosure filers did not complete their required annual ethics training. In addition, the USGS Ethics Office does not use an automated system to deliver or track ethics training, and uses an obsolete system and a manual process to track financial disclosure filers.
We provided six recommendations to help USGS improve its financial disclosure filings and ethics training, as well as the other operational inefficiencies identified in our report.