View PDF Document

Summary

The Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 (DRAA) provided over $10 billion to the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program for Hurricane Sandy relief and directed our office to provide oversight of FTA’s Hurricane Sandy relief funds. To date, FTA has awarded grants for about $577 million of those funds to transit agencies, including the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New Jersey Transit. In addition, FTA recently announced the availability of $3 billion to be competitively awarded for resilience projects intended to protect transit assets from future disasters in areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy. Transit agencies in the affected areas may also receive funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and insurance companies to cover Sandy-related expenses. To comply with DRAA, we initiated a series of audits using a three-phase strategy. In December 2013, we issued our Phase 1 assessment of FTA’s efforts to meet DRAA’s requirements and implement the new Emergency Relief Program. In this Phase 2 audit, our objectives are to (1) determine if FTA has fully implemented the processes it established to award and oversee projects receiving Hurricane Sandy funds, (2) determine whether effective controls are in place to prevent duplicate payments from FEMA and insurance companies, and (3) identify any issues that may have an impact on timely obligation and expenditure of FTA’s Hurricane Sandy funds.