Friday, February 18, 2011

Audit Title Understatement

I don't know how I happened upon this Inspector General's report (It's from 2007), but I couldn't believe the understated audit title "The Department of Justice's Internal Controls Over Terrorism Reporting." This was an audit of the quality of the statistics reported about terrorism. The audit found that the FBI and Department of Justice both under- and over-reported statistics. Causes were such things as poor queries of the database, inaccurate coding, and lack of documentation to support the incident to be terrorist-related or occurring in the time period reported. They found "that the collection and reporting of terrorism-related statistics within the Department is decentralized and haphazard." A more interesting title might have been appropriate.