EPA Needs to Get Better at Recording IT Spending

The Environmental Protection Agency hasn't been adequately reporting tech investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to an inspector general audit. 

EPA has been "noncompliant with its current policy" in recording its $334 million in IT investments, the report said. "Thus, the EPA is at risk of not managing taxpayer dollars properly," the report stated.

According to the report, EPA uses its Capital Planning and Investment Control, or CPIC, process to manage IT investments and the Registry of EPA Applications, Models and Databases, or READ, to record most IT systems. Currently, not all investments recorded in CPIC are recorded in READ, including a major investment with a budget of $15 million. 

Furthermore, the CPIC policy didn't cover EPA's medium and "lite" investments, whose budget totaled more than $83 million, the audit found. 

The inspector general recommended EPA update its policy to require all IT investments recorded in one system be included in the other and also that EPA update the CPIC process to cover all IT investments, "lite," medium and major. 

Within READ, information systems are tagged with details such as their title, description and contact information, but READ doesn't include budget, cost and expense data, the OIG found. As of August 2014, the audit discovered 1,855 READ entries, some of which were inactive. (The OIG conducted the audit between June 2014 and June 2015.)

CPIC classifies IT investments as major, medium and lite based on their dollar thresholds -- major denotes at least a $5 million investment.

But CPIC's process was specifically developed for managing major investments, and doesn't include a process for reviewing medium and lite ones, the audit found. 

According to the audit, EPA agreed with the recommendations and has drawn up plans to correct reporting issues. EPA has been updating its CPIC policy since May 2014 and expects to finalize them by December 2015.