COVID-19 Ongoing Work

The OIG is conducting an audit of the Office on Violence Against Women’s Grant Administration due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.   The preliminary objectives are to assess: (1) the grant administration and monitoring during the pandemic and (2) the guidance and assistance provided to grant recipients for addressing any increased risks to effective program implementation and to violence against women.

Personnel supporting federal health care programs are a resource critical to the federal COVID-19 pandemic response efforts.  Health care facilities must be prepared for potential personnel shortages and must have plans and processes in place to mitigate these shortages to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics.  The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee will coordinate a review of four federal health care programs, including DOJ, to determine whether these programs, or the providers they reimburse, experienced shortages in health care personnel during the pandemic, the impact of those health care personnel shortages, and strategies used by the Departments to reduce shortages of health care personnel for future pandemics.

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has initiated a review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) use of home confinement as a tool to mitigate the effect of the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic on the federal prison population.  The review will assess the BOP’s process for implementing the use of home confinement as authorized under the CARES Act, the process for its consideration of the eligibility criteria outlined in the Attorney General’s March 26 and April 3, 2020 memoranda, and the process by which BOP headquarters evaluated wardens’ recommendations that inmates who did not meet the Attorney General’s criteria be placed in home confinement.  The review will also select particular cases for examination to determine whether there were irregularities in the BOP’s processes.  If circumstances warrant, the OIG will consider including other issues that may arise during the course of the review.  The OIG is undertaking this review in response to requests from Members of Congress, and issues the OIG identified during the series of remote inspections it has conducted regarding the BOP’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.