The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) is calling on Congress to make permanent the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee’s (PRAC) Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) to conduct more effective oversight of all Federal spending.
CIGIE said the PRAC – which Congress created as a part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2020 to help combat COVID-19 fraud – has achieved “significant results” thus far through the PACE.
As of June 2023, the data platform had provided investigative support to over 40 Federal law enforcement and Office of Inspector General (OIG) partners and has led to the recovery of an estimated $2.1 billion in fraudulent funds.
More recent estimates suggest PRAC used the data platform to uncover about $5.4 billion in fraudulent loans.
“As the PACE has demonstrated, data analytics capabilities are powerful tools for OIGs to detect and prevent fraud. Many smaller OIGs do not have the resources necessary for antifraud analytics,” CIGIE Chair Mark Lee Greenblatt, who also serves as the inspector general (IG) at the Department of Interior, told members of Congress last week.
During a July 23 hearing before the House Oversight’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, Greenblatt said CIGIE’s proposal is to make this platform available to the entire IG community.
CIGIE refers to this platform as the Central Analytics and Support Hub, which would “support OIGs in the oversight of covered funds primarily through data analytics and the sharing of data to identify major risks that cut across program and agency boundaries,” according to Greenblatt.
This proposal comes as the PRAC is set to sunset in September 2025. Members of Congress and Michael Horowitz, chair of the PRAC, have voiced their support to make this data platform permanent before the PRAC comes to an end.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in April introduced the Government Spending Oversight Act to enact the White House’s call to expand and make permanent the PACE. In March, Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, introduced a Senate version of that bill.
“It is critical that the Inspector General community maintain the data analytics capability of the PRAC beyond the PRAC’s scheduled sunset date of September 30, 2025, so that the Inspector General community has an effective analytics platform to oversee federal spending,” PRAC Chair Michael Horowitz said in favor of the bill. “It would be a wasted opportunity to allow this fraud fighting tool to expire, as happened with the Recovery Operations Center in 2015.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) also called on Congress last fall to establish a permanent analytics center of excellence to help the oversight community better identify improper payments and fraud.
