A software flaw caused uncollected debts owed to over 28 federal agencies to pile up to the tune of over $472 million dollars.
The problem was reported by an anonymous whistleblower. In 2019, the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General initiated an audit in response to a referral from the Office of Special Counsel.
The whistleblower report was made regarding debts owed to the Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but the audit revealed that the extent of the problem was much larger and impacted many more agencies and totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.
The audit delineates the amount of all of the debts and to which federal agencies they are owed. The bulk of the debts were owed to the Department of Defense and “independent agencies,” totaling $134,909,410.05 and $146,706,286.45, respectively.
The debts are ones collected by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and were described in the audit report as “delinquent nontax debt [collected] on behalf of federal agencies.”
The software in question is called Cross-Servicing Next Generation (CS-NG) which is a commercial-off-the-shelf product also known as the Artiva system. It is used by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service under the Debt Collection Improvement Act (DCIA) for government-wide debt collection which includes cross-servicing efforts.
Regarding the software problem, the Treasury IG audit states “…that due to a software issue associated with the implementation of the CS-NG...
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