The United States Marshals Service’s Cooperative Agreement Program
Audit Report 05-28
June 2005
Office of the Inspector General
The objective of the audit was to determine whether the USMS has developed adequate plans, in the absence of CAP funding, to secure jail space in court cities where CAP agreements will expire during the next three fiscal years, and where jail space is scarce but no CAP agreements exist. We performed our audit work in accordance with Government Auditing Standards and, accordingly, included such tests of the records and procedures, as we deemed necessary. As part of the audit, we reviewed applicable federal laws, regulations, policies, manuals, memoranda, USMS files, and prior audit reports issued by the GAO and the Office of the Inspector General. We also interviewed officials from the USMS’s headquarters and selected District offices, JMD, the OFDT, and OMB. We conducted fieldwork at the USMS headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, the OFDT in Washington, D.C., and JMD in Washington, D.C. To determine the history of funding for the CAP, we interviewed officials at JMD the USMS, OFDT, OJP, and OMB, and obtained and analyzed documentation of:
To determine how the USMS’s detention space needs changed during FY 2001 through FY 2004, we contacted a USMS official and obtained the average daily detainee population for each fiscal year. To determine the extent to which CAP agreements will expire, how many guaranteed detention spaces will be affected by the expiring agreements, and whether detention problems may result from the expiring agreements, we performed the following.
To determine whether the USMS had other court cities where CAP agreements are not in place and where detention space may be a problem, we obtained and reviewed the 253 annual detention status surveys that USMS Districts completed for FY 2004 in which they identified their current detention status as either no problem, serious, or emergency. We then compared the surveys to the 180 active CAP agreements to identify the number of court cities whose detention status was reported as serious or emergency in the surveys but no CAP agreements were in place. To determine whether the USMS and OFDT had developed definitive plans to secure detention space in the absence of CAP funding, we interviewed officials at the USMS and OFDT. To determine whether the USMS could account for all the CAP funding appropriated since FY 2001, we performed an analysis of the funding history documentation previously discussed to identify the amount of CAP funds:
We interviewed USMS and OFDT officials to obtain explanations for ending balances that could not be reconciled to the documentation provided by the USMS and OFDT. |