Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990 went under a governmentwide review by GAO earlier this year. The act required each federal agency to issue a regulation adjusting its covered maximum and minimum civil monetary penalties for inflation by October 23, 1996, and requires them to make necessary adjustments at least once every 4 years thereafter. GAO determined that the Mine Safety and Health Administration within the Department of Labor published its first round of penalty adjustments in April 1998, but has not published a second round of adjustments for at least two eligible penalties."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Humana, Inc., a large Medicare Choice Plan, provided a prescription drug benefit with a coverage limit that was below the amount listed in its 1998 Florida Medicare Choice contract. Ernst and Young, the contractor hired by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) to review Humana's contract submission, did not detect the discrepancies because it failed to follow HCFA's review procedures. HCFA has revised its processes and procedures for monitoring the accuracy of the information in Medicare Choice plans' contracts. The Humana case shows that the agency did not follow procedures that could have revealed the contract discrepancies that caused some beneficiaries to receive less coverage for brand name prescription drugs than the amount specified in their plan's basic package. Unless HCFA adheres to its revised monitoring procedures, beneficiaries will have few guarantees that they will receive the prescription drug benefits for which the government contracted and paid."

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed grant monitoring and evaluation efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Justice Program (OJP). This report discusses the monitoring of discretionary grants awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance's (BJA) Byrne Program and the Violence Against Women Office (VAWO) within OJP. In constant 2000 dollars, Byrne and VAWO discretionary grants grew about 85 percent--from $105 million to $194 million between fiscal years 1997 and 2000. These funds were awarded to state and local governments, either on a competitive basis or pursuant to legislation allocating funds through congressional earmarks. BJA and VAWO, together with OJP's Office of the Comptroller, are responsible for monitoring these grants to ensure they are implemented as intended, are responsive to grant goals and objectives, and comply with statutory regulations and policy guidelines. OJP's monitoring requirements include the development of monitoring plans that articulate who will conduct monitoring, the manner in which it will be done, and when and what type of monitoring activities are planned. Grant managers are to maintain documentation in grant files using such techniques as written reports of on-site reviews and telephone interview write-ups. …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Social Security Administration (SSA) receives death reports from multiple sources, including state vital records agencies (states), family members, and other federal agencies to create its set of death records. In accordance with the Social Security Act (Act), SSA shares its full set of death data with certain agencies that pay federally-funded benefits, for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy of those payments. For other users of SSA's death data, SSA extracts a subset of records into a file called the Death Master File (DMF), which, to comply with the Act, excludes state-reported death data. SSA makes the DMF available via the Department of Commerce's National Technical Information Service, from which any member of the public can purchase DMF data. Certain procedures that SSA uses for collecting, verifying, and maintaining death reports could result in erroneous or untimely death information. For example, SSA does not independently verify all reports before including them in its death records. In accordance with its policy, the agency only verifies death reports for Social Security beneficiaries in order to stop benefit payments, and then, verifies only those reports from sources it …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has indicated that one-third of Amex's new listings did not meet the exchange's equity listing standards. Amex's listing guidelines address factors that are the same or similar to those addressed by other U.S. stock markets. Quantitative requirements addressed share price, stockholders' equity, income, and market value of publicly held shares. However, the minimum thresholds for meeting these requirements varied to reflect the differences in the companies that each market targeted for listing. The most significant difference between Amex's guidelines and the listing standards of other U.S. stock markets was that Amex was one of only two markets that retained discretion to initially list companies that did not meet all of its quantitative requirements. Amex had not implemented the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations' (OCIE) recommendations on the exchange's discretionary listing decisions. OCIE officials told GAO that in the absence of an Amex agreement to address the recommendations, they would include them among the open significant recommendations to be reported to the SEC Commissioners as a result of a 1998 GAO recommendation. The Commission can require Amex to implement OCIE's …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of State is leading an interagency assessment of staffing needs in U.S. embassies and consulates to improve mission effectiveness and reduce security vulnerabilities and costs. This process, called "rightsizing," was begun in response to the recommendations of the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel. In the aftermath of the August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, the Panel determined that overseas staffing levels had not been adjusted to reflect changing missions and requirements; thus, some embassies and consulates were overstaffed, and others were understaffed. The Panel recommended a rightsizing strategy to improve security by reducing the number of embassy staff at risk. The Panel also recommended the establishment of a permanent committee to regularly adjust the U.S. presence, and the adoption of explicit criteria to guide decisions on the size and location of posts. A State-led interagency committee conducted pilot studies at six embassies in 2000 to (1) develop a methodology for assessing staffing at embassies and consulates during the next five years and (2) recommend adjustments to staffing levels at the embassies studied. The interagency committee formed teams that visited U.S. embassies in Amman, …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Concerns arose in the late 1990s about day trading, particularly the use of questionable advertising to attract customers without fully disclosing or by downplaying the risks involved. Concerns were also raised that traders were losing large amounts of money. Day traders as a group and day trading firms have continued to evolve and are generally more experienced and sophisticated about securities markets and investing than was the case several years ago. Likewise, day trading firms' operations have evolved, and many have shifted their primary focus away from retail customers and toward attracting institutional customers, such as hedge funds and money market managers. Furthermore, more firms are likely to engage in proprietary trading activities through professional traders that trade the firms' own capital. Finally, although the number of day trading firms appears to have remained constant, several day trading firms have been acquired by other brokerages and market participants whose customers want the direct access to securities markets and market information that technology used by day trading firms provides. Since GAO's 2000 review, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the self-regulatory organizations have addressed many of the …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "GAO reviewed the following key outcomes in National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) fiscal year 2002 performance plan: expanding scientific knowledge of the Earth's system, expanding the commercial development of space, and deploying and operating the International Space Station. GAO found that NASA has improved its fiscal year 2002 performance plan and responded to recommendations by GAO and others to make its plan more useful--particularly by providing more comprehensive explanations of how it plans to verify and validate performance data and by better explaining how its performance goals will benefit the public. NASA's annual performance goals appear to be objective and should help to measure progress toward the outcomes. However, the plan still does not explain the reasons for changes in performance goals. Not having these explanations could hinder assessments of NASA's performance."