We audited the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Office of Administration's internal controls over the processing of personnel actions in response to an anonymous complaint received by our office. Our objectives were to determine why (1) human resource actions were not processed in a timely manner, (2) employee requests to waive the automatic collection of payroll overpayments were not processed before collection actions began, (3) adequate documentation to support job vacancy announcements was not maintained, and (4) employees were able to initiate their own personnel action requests.

The design and implementation of HUD's internal controls over collection waivers, new hire paperwork, processing of awards, promotions, within-grade increases, pending personnel action requests, and job vacancy announcements were inadequate. The issues identified in our review indicated a lack of internal controls to ensure (1) the timely processing of collection waiver requests and new hire paperwork, (2) that employees were afforded the opportunity to request a collection waiver before salary offsets were taken, and (3) that Office of Personnel Management job announcement policies and procedures and record-keeping standards were followed. Finally, in certain circumstances, the HR Connect system lacked the controls to prevent employees from being involved in the processing of their own personnel action requests, which made HUD vulnerable to the processing of potentially fraudulent actions.

We recommend that the Director of HUD's Office of Human Resources implement a tracking system for (1) monitoring new hire accession paperwork and (2) processing awards, promotions, within-grade increases, transmittal of application status notification letters, and collection waiver requests. Additionally, policies and procedures regarding the processing of collection waiver requests should include timeliness standards for the research and review phases to ensure that decisions are made in a timely manner and that collection actions are not premature. In addition, we recommend that policies and procedures be established to include supervisory review of pending new hire paperwork actions, job announcement case files, and checklists upon closeout. Staff should be retrained regarding new hire paperwork policies and procedures. We also recommend that the Director of the Office of Human Resources ensure that staff perform the necessary reviews to certify that each job vacancy case file properly supports the recruitment process and employees do not participate in the processing of their own personnel action requests. Lastly, we recommend that all employees be informed that it is not allowable to participate in the processing of their own personnel action requests.