An annual audit of operations and budgeting at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently was released, with auditors KPMG LLP discovering one deficiency related to the bureau’s closing out of undelivered orders.
The audit looked into three areas, including the budget process, the CFPB’s monitoring of its interagency agreement with the Bureau of Fiscal Service-Administrative Resource Center and its corrective actions on last year’s reported deficiency.
The audit report shows that KPMG did not identify findings related to the interagency agreement, and the deficiency from last year’s report was addressed but not completely handled.
“Although procedures to address the finding have been identified and drafted, they had not been finalized at the time of our report,” KPMG said in the report.
The one internal control deficiency the report cited was the untimely de-obligation of stale obligations.
Semi-annually, the office of the chief financial officer and the office of the chief procurement office review open obligations and complete close-out processes. At the time of KPMG’s review, however, it found eight undelivered orders which had not been closed out, despite lengthy periods of time since activity:
“Stale obligations potentially prevent the release of additional funds for use by CFPB for other operational requirements and offer the opportunity for improper payments to be made against obligations that should have been closed out,” the report stated.
To fix the actions, the auditors made four recommendations in the report:
“The CFPB agrees with the auditor’s recommendations,” the bureau said, according to the report. “In (fiscal) 2018, OCFO will continue to work with the Office of Procurement and program offices to refine the contract close-out process and other procedures to improve the efficiency of de-obligations.”
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