HHS’ Office of Inspector General Announces New Strategic Plan: What Contractors Should Know
On October 3, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a strategic plan for improving oversight of public grants and contracts “to strengthen compliance with HHS award requirements; promote award practices that achieve program outcomes; and mitigate fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” This comes as grant fraud related to awards by HHS and other agencies routinely makes the news. For example, in July Janet Mello was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing over $100 million from a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/Department of Defense (DoD) grant program aimed at helping military families. Similarly, fraud stemming from the Paycheck Protection Act has been dubbed the “biggest fraud in a generation.” In Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, excluding the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), HHS awarded about 142,000 grants totaling more than $77 billion and over 50,000 contracts amounting t...