How to Read an Inspector General Report and Use It to Hold an Agency to Account

The Founders gave you a government that was supposed to be watched. They did not give you a staff to do the watching. That job falls to the citizen, and Congress, and a few institutions Congress built along the way. One of the best of them is sitting on the internet, free, and almost nobody uses it.

Every major federal agency has an Inspector General, an official whose entire job is to audit and investigate that agency from the inside and to say so in public. The reports run from dry to explosive. A citizen who knows how to read one can ask sharper questions than most of the press corps. This post is a plain how-to, with the history and the reasons behind it, so that you know what you are holding and what to do with it.

Why this office exists

Madison put the problem in Federalist 51: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." The second half of that sentence is the Inspector General's reason for being. A government large enough to do what ours does must be made to examine itself, and the examiner must have enough independence to say what he finds.

The office is not in the Constitution. It is a creature of statute, and a young one. Congress passed the Inspector General Act of 1978, signed on October 12 of that year, after a series of scandals and after a fight over whether audits and investigations inside an agency could be trusted when the same agency head controlled them. The act created Offices of Inspector General at twelve departments and agencies and gave them three jobs: to conduct audits and investigations, to promote economy and efficiency and prevent and detect fraud and abuse, and to keep both the agency head and Congress fully and currently informed. The act was recodified in Title 5 of the U.S. Code in 2022, but its structure remains.

Two features make the office unusual. The first is the dual reporting line. An Inspector General reports to the head of the agency but also, directly, to Congress. The agency head may not prevent the Inspector General from issuing a report or starting an audit, subject to narrow exceptions in the statute. The second is the semiannual report, discussed below.

In 2008, Congress passed the Inspector General Reform Act, which strengthened the offices' independence, required that each have its own budget line, and created the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, known as CIGIE, a council that coordinates the community, sets standards and runs the central website. Later laws, including the Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2016, gave Inspectors General clearer access to agency records.

Step 1. Know which kind of Inspector General you are dealing with

There are two basic kinds. Inspectors General at larger cabinet departments and a number of other agencies are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Those at many smaller agencies and boards, called designated federal entities, are appointed by the agency head or board. Both kinds publish reports and both have hotlines. The Senate-confirmed ones are a little more insulated, and the statute requires the President to give Congress written notice of the reasons before removing one.

You do not need to memorize that. What you need to know is that nearly every agency you can name has an Inspector General, that there are dozens of them in all, and that you can find yours by searching "[agency name] Office of Inspector General."

Step 2. Go to the right place

Go to Oversight.gov. It is the website CIGIE runs to put the reports of the whole community in one searchable place. You can search by agency, by topic, by date, and by report type. It lists audits and evaluations, investigations that have been made public, and what are called "open recommendations," which I will explain in a moment. The reports are free to read and free to download. Each agency's own Inspector General site also posts the same reports, often with more detail about the agency.

If you want to start somewhere, start with an agency whose work touches your life: the department that runs your benefits, the one that runs your local base or hospital, the one that inspects what you eat. The reports are written for a general reader more often than you would think, because Congress is the audience.

Step 3. Know the three kinds of report

Not every report is the same animal. Read the title and the first page and sort it.

An audit checks whether an agency's money, controls or programs meet the law and its own rules. Financial statement audits belong here, as do performance audits that ask whether a program does what it claims.

An inspection or evaluation is usually a shorter review of a specific operation, such as a facility, a process or a policy, aimed at finding what works and what does not.

An investigation looks into specific wrongdoing, such as fraud, waste or misconduct by an employee or contractor. Many investigations end in referral to the Justice Department, and many are not made public until a case is closed, and some are never published in full. You will often see their results as summaries of closed cases in the semiannual report.

Step 4. Read it in this order

A report can run a hundred pages. Do not start at the top and read to the end. Read it like a lawyer reads a contract.

1. Read the summary or the "what we found" page first. Most reports lead with a short statement of the objective, the finding and the recommendation. If the summary says nothing you can use, the report may not be worth your afternoon.
2. Find the recommendations. They are normally a numbered list, and they are the working part of the report. Each is a specific action the Inspector General asks the agency to take.
3. Find the agency's response. The agency usually gets to reply, and the reply is included. Look for one of three answers: it concurs, it partially concurs or it does not concur. A refusal on a major finding is news.
4. Check the objective and scope. What did the auditors say they were looking at, and what period? A finding about 2019 does not prove anything about a later year, and the report will say what it covers.
5. Look at the numbers and how they were made. Did the auditors test the whole program or a sample? A report that says it reviewed "a statistical sample" will usually tell you how big. Beware any headline figure whose source you cannot locate in the text.
6. Read the footnotes on dollar amounts. Reports distinguish between questioned costs, which are costs an auditor doubts were allowable, and funds put to better use, which are savings the agency could achieve if it adopted a recommendation. These are different, and neither is the same as "waste." An honest citizen uses the term the report used.

Step 5. Understand "open recommendations"

This is the part that makes the Inspector General system useful and not just interesting. When an Inspector General issues a recommendation, the agency has to say what it will do. Until the Inspector General agrees that it has done it, the recommendation stays open. Oversight.gov lets you view open recommendations by agency, and some Inspectors General list the ones with the largest potential cost savings.

An old open recommendation is a question you can put to anyone in power. A recommendation that has been open for years, on a problem the agency agreed was real, tells you something about priorities. If you are looking for a place to start, ask for the oldest open recommendation at an agency, and ask why it is open.

Step 6. Read the semiannual report

By law, each Inspector General sends Congress a semiannual report covering the six months that end on March 31 and September 30. The report lists the audits, inspections and investigations completed during the period, the significant problems found, the recommendations made, the recommendations not yet implemented, the dollar value of questioned costs and funds put to better use, and the status of what the agency did in response. It also lists any instance in which the agency head refused the Inspector General access to information. That is the Inspector General's way of telling Congress that it was stonewalled.

If you read only one document from an agency's Inspector General, read this. It is the one that lays the whole portfolio on the table, and it is written for the people who control the agency's budget.

Step 7. Use the hotline

Every Inspector General runs a hotline for reports of fraud, waste, abuse and misconduct. The address is on the Inspector General's own website, and it is usually a web form and a phone number. If you work for a government agency, a contractor or a grantee and see something wrong, or if you are a citizen who has evidence of a misuse of federal money, you may report it.

A few points to keep in mind.

• Be specific. A tip with a name, a program, a date, a location and a document is a tip an investigator can use. A tip that says "something is going on" is not.
• Do not guess at motives. State what you saw and what records exist. Leave the conclusions to the investigators.
• Know your protections. The Inspector General Act bars an Inspector General from disclosing the identity of an employee who files a complaint without that employee's consent, unless the disclosure is unavoidable during an investigation. Federal whistleblower statutes also prohibit retaliation against employees who report in good faith. That is not legal advice about your own situation. If you are a federal employee or a contractor and are thinking of filing, ask the Office of Special Counsel or a lawyer about your own case first.
• Do not use the hotline for a personal grievance. It is for fraud, waste and abuse of federal money and authority.

Step 8. Take it to Congress

A report in a drawer does nothing. The Inspector General does not have power to compel an agency to act. Congress does, through its power of the purse and its power to hold hearings and conduct oversight. Everything depends on someone with a vote picking up the finding and asking about it.

Here is how to make that happen.

1. Pick one finding. Choose a finding that matters to your community and that you can state in two sentences.
2. Identify your members. Use My Representatives to find your House member and your two senators.
3. Write a short letter or call the office. Name the report by its title, number and date. Quote the recommendation, state the agency's response, and ask the member a specific question: has the committee that oversees this agency asked about the open recommendation? Will the member ask the agency head in a hearing?
4. Ask who has jurisdiction. Each agency answers to particular House and Senate committees. If you know which committee oversees the agency, you can write to the committee as well, since the committee's staff handle these reports.
5. Follow up in a month. Ask what was done. Staff members respect a constituent who keeps a file.

You can see how the oversight function is organized, and the committees involved, on the oversight page.

Step 9. Know what an Inspector General cannot do

A fair account includes the limits. An Inspector General cannot order an agency to follow a recommendation, cannot prosecute, and cannot fire anyone. The reports are limited by the scope the auditors chose and by what the agency lets them see. Inspectors General vary in quality and in independence, as people do. The office is a tool, and its value depends on whether Congress and the public use what it produces.

There is also a real debate on the other side about the independence of Inspectors General from the President and how they may be removed, and about the burden of paperwork on agencies. A thoughtful reader will take that debate seriously and will notice that it does not change the basic point: the reports are public, they are free, and they are a record of what a government says about itself.

Measured against the Founding

The framers built the legislature to be the body that watches the executive. Article I gives Congress the power to make laws, to tax and spend, and to provide for the manner in which the laws shall be executed. The power to investigate is not spelled out in the text, but the Supreme Court has long held that it is inherent in the power to legislate, and in 1792 the House ordered an investigation of the St. Clair expedition, an early investigation of the executive branch by a congressional committee. Article II, Section 3 charges the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. An Inspector General is an instrument for both: a way for the executive to look at itself, and a way for Congress to see what it is paying for.

If you take one thing from the Founders, take this: they did not trust any officeholder with unwatched power, including officeholders they liked. Federalist 51 puts it in a famous line: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." A citizen who reads an Inspector General report is doing a small part of that work.

For related reading, see Washington Admits It Sends Billions to the Wrong People, by Law Every Year on the government's own admission of improper payments, GAO's High-Risk List Has Named Some of the Same Programs Since 1990 on the Government Accountability Office's list of vulnerable programs, and How to File a FOIA Request and Get a Federal Agency to Answer You on how to obtain the records behind a report.

The case in brief

1. Inspectors General exist because a government large enough to govern must be made to examine itself, and Congress created the office by statute in 1978.
2. Oversight.gov puts the reports of the whole Inspector General community in one free, searchable place; read the summary, the recommendations and the agency's response first.
3. Open recommendations and the semiannual report show what an agency has been told to fix and what it has not yet fixed.
4. A specific, documented hotline tip is useful, and the Inspector General Act protects a complainant's identity in most cases.
5. A finding does not enforce itself; it becomes pressure only when a citizen brings it to a member of Congress who has the power to ask the agency why.

What you can do: Search Oversight.gov for the Inspector General of an agency that affects your family, find its oldest open recommendation, and write to your member of Congress asking whether the oversight committee has raised it.