Federal workers face serious risks during the coronavirus pandemic performing jobs such as guarding prisoners, delivering mail or providing nursing care. But teleworking has also led to problems, such as delays processing millions of paper tax forms or potentially exposing national secrets to hackers, USA Today reported. Just spending $2.2 trillion as quickly as Congress directed in response to the pandemic opened doors for waste, fraud and abuse. These are among the potential problems that a group of inspectors general warned federal agencies to avoid in a 92-page report yesterday called “Top Challenges Facing Federal Agencies: Covid-19 Emergency Relief and Response Efforts." “Part of our mandate is to not only detect waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement, but hopefully prevent it from happening on the front end,” Robert Westbrooks, executive director of the inspectors general group called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told USA TODAY. “This is a road map for agency managers and for policy makers to help them address some common issues.” Congress created the committee of 20 inspectors general to track the pandemic response because of the unprecedented size and speed of the response to the pandemic. “Inspectors general continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight of the more than $2.4 trillion in emergency coronavirus response spending,” said Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Justice Department and acting chairman of the committee.
