The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) failed to properly report almost all of its award outlay spending in fiscal year 2022, according to a new report by the agency’s Office of the Inspector General.
The report, published Tuesday, found that the EPA failed to accurately or completely report its fiscal year 2022 spending to USAspending.gov, the official open source registry for government spending. The agency did not properly report 12.9% of its promised future award spending and 99.9% of the EPA’s actual award payments made in fiscal year 2022, according to the report.
“It’s outrageous and unacceptable that the EPA cannot keep track of its spending or inform Congress — and the American people— of how it is using taxpayer dollars,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said of the report’s findings. “This eye-opening report only further highlights the need for more transparency at the EPA. It also raises questions about whether the agency is incapable of managing its record-high budget or if the agency is attempting to hide the amount of taxpayer dollars it is spending to advance the administration’s radical rush-to-green agenda.” (RELATED: America’s Power Grid Could Gum Up Biden EPA’s Plan To Electrify School Buses, Report Finds)
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The EPA also failed to properly report $5.8 billion worth of grants, contracts and loans that it shelled out in fiscal year 2022, a figure that amounts to 99.9% of all award money that the agency gave out that year. The agency initially underreported its fiscal year 2022 award obligations by $1.2 billion, according to the report.
“EPA welcomes and appreciates the Office of the Inspector General’s oversight and recommendations. EPA properly accounted for FY 2022 funding, which is validated by OIG’s FY 2022 clean unmodified audit opinion of EPA’s financial statements,” an agency spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This was an issue transmitting data to USASpending.gov, which has been corrected.”
The report, which notes that the EPA has since taken steps to correct the issues that led to the reporting failures, asserts that EPA’s reporting shortcomings in 2022 “led to taxpayers being initially misinformed about the EPA’s spending, and policy-makers who relied on the data may not have been able to effectively track federal spending.”
Some of the underreported spending came from funds allocated by the bipartisan infrastructure package of 2021 and coronavirus-related programs, according to the report. The agency failed to report a single dollar of spending related to the infrastructure bill in 2022, later correcting its data to reflect that it outlayed more than $62 million in funds related to that legislation.
“The EPA is an agency that has been working far beyond its mandate for many years now. So much money now flows in and out each year that even they understand their waste rate is increasing and they have troubling getting their arms around their own spending,” Adam Andrzejewski, the founder and CEO of Open The Books, an organization that monitors and advocates for greater transparency in government spending, told the DCNF. “These reporting problems represent billions of our taxpayer dollars; losing track of that kind of cash isn’t just a mix-up, it’s unacceptable to the American people.”
The agency’s enacted budget for fiscal year 2022 was about $9.6 billion, according to its website.
“Complete and accurate reporting in USAspending.gov is critical, as it is the primary way the EPA informs the public of the purpose of its federal awards and where its funding ultimately goes,” the office of the inspector general (OIG) wrote in the report.
The agency’s enacted budget has grown by more than $1 billion since fiscal year 2020, according to its website, and it is poised to give out billions of dollars in grants for “green banks,” or organizations that provide financing for green energy projects, and “environmental justice” in 2024.
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