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Summary

The Office of Inspector General is initiating an audit of the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA's) regional oversight of transit grants.  FTA's regional offices play an important role in overseeing grantees' use of Federal funds to ensure they are spent efficiently and effectively and to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse.  FTA's programs received over $10 billion in appropriations in fiscal year 2010.  In addition to the annual appropriations, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided FTA with a one-time infusion of over $8 billion for capital investments and increased the scope of FTA's already significant oversight responsibilities.  Accordingly, we plan to assess FTA's regional oversight of transit grants to determine whether those oversight efforts are effective in ensuring proper stewardship of Federal funds and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse. 

For each selected regional office, our objectives will be to assess:  (1) regional oversight responsibilities and types of support provided by FTA Headquarters; (2) the regional office's use of key oversight tools to identify grantees' management weaknesses and make funding decisions; and (3) the regional office's efforts to ensure that grantees are correcting identified management weaknesses.