Actions by inspectors general resulted in the recovery of $4 billion in misspent federal funds in 1999, according to an annual progress report by the government's watchdogs.
The 83-page progress report, sent to President Clinton this week, also documents $8.2 billion worth of potential savings identified by IGs, $10.5 billion in efficiency recommendations, more than 13,000 successful prosecutions and 1,200 civil actions pursued. It highlights the substantial role that inspectors general played in mitigating the potential Y2K disaster.
"This was an extremely active year for us," said Gaston Gianni, vice chair of the President's Council for Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE), the IG umbrella organization that issued the report. "The first thing that comes to mind when people think of our members is as auditors, people that come in after the fact. But for the millennium issue, we focused very hard in each agency on offering real-time services, or else it would have been too late."
The 1978 Inspector General Act created independent audit and investigative offices in 12 federal agencies, aiming to end the practice that saw auditors and investigators under the direction of the same programs they were reviewing. IGs have been established at several other agencies since then.
President Reagan established the PCIE in 1981. Its counterpart, the Executive Council on Integrity and Efficiency (ECIE), represents IGs not appointed by the President but rather by designated federal entity heads. The groups represent 11,000 employees across the federal government, 3,000 of which serve as investigators. Responsible for reporting both to their agency heads and to Congress, IGs often walk a fine line.
"The fact that we have to report to Congress is not always comfortable for the agencies," Gaston conceded.
Beyond helping everyone from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the Defense Department anticipate and avoid Y2K meltdowns, the various inspectors general involved themselves in several other high-profile federal issues.
When news broke that certain public broadcasting stations had violated their charters by swapping donor lists with the Democratic Party, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's inspector general quickly audited all of the nearly 1,000 PBS stations. The IG's discovery that only 10 percent of the stations had engaged in such behavior quelled some of the rising political storm surrounding the matter.
And the Energy Department's inspector general may have been among the first to detect weaknesses in that agency's security systems. According to the report, "testing revealed significant internal and/or external weaknesses that rendered the DOE's unclassified computer networks vulnerable to malicious attacks."
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