Report to Congress: April 1, 2024 through September 30, 2024
We're pleased to present the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee's (PRAC) Semiannual Report to Congress, which highlights our accomplishments between April 1 and September 30, 2024. It's been more than four years since the PRAC’s creation, and we, along with our Office of Inspector General (OIG) partners, remain committed to the mission of effectively overseeing more than $5 trillion in federal pandemic relief funds.
As we approach the PRAC's sunset date of September 2025, we also look to the future by encouraging Congress to sustain PRAC’s analytics platform. This good-government initiative has provided deep program insights, sophisticated data analytics tools, and innovative oversight models with an unbeatable return on investment for detecting and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse. We believe the time is now to preserve these PRAC innovations and apply these fraud prevention and detection tools to all federal spending.
Here are some of our accomplishments from this time period.
Highlights from the report
"We encourage Congress to maintain the valuable fraud-fighting tools of our data analytics center and expand its jurisdiction beyond pandemic relief funds. Without it, the federal government will no longer have an entity capable of proactively conducting cross-program, cross-agency analysis to help prevent improper payments in high-risk programs."
Michael E. Horowitz, PRAC Chair
We launched the Blueprint for Enhanced Program Integrity.
This five-chapter research project shares lessons learned and best practices to help strengthen federal programs, enhance stewardship, and ensure that taxpayer-funded programs and assistance are delivered to the communities that need them. Chapter 1 focuses on helping program administrators develop and implement programs with strong internal controls. Chapter 2 for policymakers provides strategies for protecting programs against fraud and improper payments.
We issued reports on the impact of pandemic relief programs on three communities across the country.
Between April 2024 and September 2024, we issued individual reports for three of the six locations we had visited -- Springfield, MA, Coeur d’Alene, ID, and Sheridan County, NE. These reports focused on the specific programs and subprograms that provided emergency response funding in each of the locations.
