The housing regulator failed to provide the required training to contractors, it is stated
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has failed to comply with management training standards for onboarding and offboarding employees and contractors, according to the Office of Inspector General (OIG).
The OIG requires the housing regulator to follow federal records management standards that mandate FHFA to provide records management training to newly hired (onboarded) personnel and senior officials who have departed (offboarded) the agency.
But, the FHFA couldn’t demonstrate that it provided the required training to all onboarded contractors, nor to five of 11 offboarded senior agency officials, according to the OIG’s 2020 audit report.
“We recommended that FHFA develop and implement procedures to ensure that contractor employees complete required records management training at the time of onboarding and that FHFA senior officials complete required targeted records management training at time of offboarding,” the OIG said. “FHFA agreed and established procedures to ensure that it followed records management standards for onboarded and offboarded personnel.”
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“Historically, Records and Information Management (RIM) has relied on in-person training and manually intensive processes to track records management training,” the FHFA said in a statement. “RIM is working with other Office of the Chief Operating Officer functions to automate as much of the tracking as possible by leveraging system and reporting enhancements.”
The OIG closed the recommendation in February 2021 based on these new procedures.
However, in its latest compliance review, the OIG found “a number of deficiencies in FHFA’s implementation of its new procedures” during the review period – Mar. 1, 2021, through Feb. 28, 2023.
“For example, the new procedures require FHFA to maintain an updated log to document that all personnel take records management training within 60 days of onboarding, but the log contains numerous data errors,” the OIG said. “FHFA also does not maintain accurate data for the dates when contractors onboard with the agency. As a result, FHFA is unable to monitor agency personnel’s compliance with the 60-day onboarding training requirement.
“FHFA also could not document that eight of 27 senior officials we reviewed (30%) received records management training when they offboarded. The agency office responsible for providing the training said that in some instances, senior officials offboarded without completing it despite the agency’s notifying them of the requirement.”
The OIG has reopened the recommendation from its 2020 audit and has given the FHFA until the end of the year to remediate the deficiencies.
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