Correspondence

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The Government Charge Card Abuse Prevention Act of 2012 requires executive branch agencies to establish and maintain internal controls to ensure the proper, efficient, and effective use of travel charge cards and safeguards and internal controls for purchase cards. The act also requires inspectors general to perform periodic risk assessments of illegal, improper, or erroneous purchases in charge card programs of executive agencies spending more than $10 million annually. Accordingly, we initiated a risk assessment review of DOT’s Charge Card Program for calendar years 2020 and 2021 to identify and analyze risk to assist DOT-OIG in determining the necessary scope, frequency, and number of periodic audits of charge card programs. For calendar years 2020 and 2021, we determined the risk to be medium for illegal, improper, or erroneous purchases in DOT’s charge card program. Specifically, we identified an excessive number of purchase card accounts per approving official, purchases made on holidays or weekends, and untimely completion of purchase card training as potential high-risk levels and areas in DOT’s purchase card program. We also identified delinquent travel cardholder accounts as well as instances of travel card purchases made after employees separated from the Agency.