Justice Discretionary Grants

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. GAO's review of 46 Byrne and 84 VAWO discretionary grants indicated that only 29 percent of Byrne and 11 percent of VAWO award files contained monitoring plans. In addition, for awards covering the most recent 12-month period, grant managers were not consistently documenting their monitoring activities. BJA and VAWO cannot systematically oversee grant managers' compliance with monitoring requirements because documentation is not readily available. Both BJA and VAWO rely on staff meetings and discussions to identify grant problems or monitoring issues, and neither have management information systems to compile and analyze data on monitoring activities. OJP has begun to work with its bureaus and offices to address grant management problems, but it is too early to tell whether OJP's efforts will be effective.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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