Reports

On March 27, 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) was enacted. It included $8 billion for direct payments to Indian Tribes and $522 million of direct appropriations to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) for COVID-19 response.

The OIG investigated allegations that a tribal wildland fire employee submitted false overtime claims in 2018. We found insufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegation. The wildland fire employee denied the allegations and said any overtime claimed was fire related, and we did not find any evidence to refute this statement. The wildland fire employee’s supervisor signed and approved all the employee’s timesheets.

On March 27, 2020, the President signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). To date the CARES Act has provided the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) with $909.7 million, which includes direct apportionments of $756 million to support the needs of DOI programs, bureaus, Indian Country, and the Insular Areas, and a $153.7 million transfer from the U.S. Department of Education to the BIE. This report presents the DOI’s progress as of November 30, 2020, in spending CARES Act appropriations.

We reviewed the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI’s) compliance with four requirements from Executive Order 13950, Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. The DOI met two of the requirements we reviewed and made progress toward compliance in the other two. This report was issued to the Secretary of the Interior for his information. We did not offer recommendations or require any further action.

The OIG investigated an allegation that a company improperly billed hours in late 2018 and early 2019 to a grant it received from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) to manage Hurricane Sandy coastal resiliency projects. We determined that five employees of the company recorded 561.75 labor hours to the NFWF grant when, in fact, they worked on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contract. We learned that the company corrected the improper billing and took administrative action against four employees before we initiated our investigation.