DATA Act

Since 2017, DHS has continued to make progress in meeting its Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) reporting requirements, but challenges remain.  To enable more effective tracking of Federal spending, DHS must continue to take action to accurately align its budgetary data with the President’s budget, reduce award misalignments across DATA Act files, improve the timeliness of financial assistance reporting, implement and use government-wide data standards, and address risks to data quality.  Without these actions, DHS will continue to experience challenges in meeting its goal of achieving the highest possible data quality for submission to USAspending.gov.  We made five recommendations to help strengthen DHS’ controls for ensuring complete, accurate, and timely spending data.  The Department concurred with all five recommendations. 

The DATA Act required the OIG to review a statistically valid sample of DHS’ fiscal year 2017, 2nd quarter spending data posted on USASpending.gov and to submit to Congress a report assessing the data’s completeness, timeliness, quality, and accuracy; and DHS’ implementation and use of Government-wide financial data standards. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) required DHS to submit, by May 2017, complete, accurate, and timely spending data to the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) for publication on USASpending.gov beginning with the 2nd quarter of FY 2017. DHS successfully certified and submitted its FY 2017/Q2 spending data for posting on USASpending.gov in April 2017. Although DHS met the DATA Act’s mandated submission deadline, we identified issues concerning the completeness and accuracy of its first data submission that hinders the quality and usefulness of the information.