The former Occupational Safety and Health Administration staffer alerted officials nearly three years ago to unpaid fines owed the agency from companies with workplace safety violations. The Treasury Department, which did not collect the money because of a computer software error, soon found millions were owed to OSHA.
Now, it’s clear the glitch created a much larger problem than anyone — including the anonymous whistleblower — realized.
As a result of his complaint to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a new audit has found that the government didn’t collect almost $473 million owed to 28 federal offices, including the House, through June 27.
Problems apparently began in October 2017, when Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service installed “a commercial off-the-shelf” computer program for government-wide debt collection, according to July 7 report from the Bureau. This new system was unable to initiate collection requests from agencies “due to a software error primarily occurring when a business address was provided instead of a primary address,” the report explained. That meant “demand letters … could not be sent because of the missing or incorrect address information.”
This was fixed by January 2020 — but still, not much of the missing money has been collected. As of June 27, the report said, only 10 percent of the $96.9 million owed to OSHA was collected. The problem for the other agencies is much worse. They have collected just $3.2 million, less than 1 percent of...
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