We issued a management advisory to the Office of Acquisition and Property Management (PAM) after receiving PAM’s response to our evaluation of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) ability to track data for land purchases made with grant funds. In our evaluation report, we recommended that the DOI establish a centralized method of tracking land purchases made using grant funds, and that it establish policy to inform grantees of the Federal reporting requirements.
In its response, PAM disagreed with our recommendations, but it based its disagreement on an incorrect application of the Federal reporting requirements. PAM officials also expressed concern that creating a tracking system for these types of purchases would be too costly. Without a central database or a standard way for grantees to report land purchased with Federal funds, however, DOI risks not being able to adequately track real property acquired through Federal awards to ensure that the original purposes of the awards are met.
We also found that Federal grants officers making these awards had varied levels of expertise and experience with real estate appraisals, which could result in potentially overvalued purchases. DOI could save millions of dollars in potentially overvalued properties if all grants officers received the basic tools and knowledge to identify potentially flawed appraisals for further review by a certified appraiser.
We referred our original recommendations, which remain unresolved, to the Office of Policy, Management and Budget to track implementation. We made three additional recommendations in our management advisory that focused on developing policy to clarify the grantees’ reporting and disposition requirements for land purchased with grant funds, and identifying potentially flawed appraisals.