[WallStreetPR] The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) didn’t report a staggering $7 billion in award-level obligations and outlays during fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general audit released this week.
The EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) determined that the agency underreported its award-level outlays by $5.8 billion, or 99.9%, and its award-level obligations by $1.2 billion, or 12.9% during FY22, the period between October 2021 and September 2022. The agency further failed to report any of its Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act outlays and under-reported its coronavirus pandemic-related outlays.
The EPA ultimately corrected its FY22 figures in May 2023 as a result of the OIG audit while making configuration changes a month later. Overall, the inspector general made five recommendations which it said the agency agreed to make.
The report, meanwhile, comes as the EPA both manages a massive green energy fund and continues to request a larger budget. The Inflation Reduction, Democrats’ massive climate and tax bill passed in 2022, created the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which in turn establishes a national green bank to fund green projects nationwide.
And the White House is requesting that Congress approve a FY24 EPA budget of more than $12 billion, a record level. Republicans have aimed to reduce the EPA budget to about $6 billion, which would be the agency’s smallest budget since the early 1990s.
“The Biden administration is using EPA as a pass through for taxpayer dollars to fund left-wing groups that aim to get Democrats elected, not improve the environment,” Mandy Gunasekara, a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow who served as the EPA’s chief of staff during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital.
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