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Open Recommendations (55 total)

College Athletics: Education Should Improve Its Title IX Enforcement Efforts

GAO-24-105994
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should ensure that the Office for Civil Rights requires staff to consistently record due dates in the case management system for responding to colleges' monitoring reports in Title IX athletics cases. Management should use information from the case management system to evaluate response times against established timeliness goals. (Recommendation 3)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

College Athletics: Education Should Improve Its Title IX Enforcement Efforts

GAO-24-105994
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2 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should ensure that the Office for Civil Rights regularly analyzes available Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act data and expands its use of the data for oversight activities, consistent with available resources. (Recommendation 1)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should ensure that the Office for Civil Rights establishes agency timeliness goals for reviewing monitoring reports and for responding to colleges during monitoring of Title IX athletics cases. (Recommendation 2)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Higher Education: Employment Discrimination Case Referrals Between Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Could Be Improved

GAO-24-105516
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education Education should track the number of days it takes regional offices to refer employment discrimination complaints to EEOC and use the information to develop a plan to reduce referral delays. Such a plan could include applying good practices from certain regional offices agency-wide, or reallocating resources. (Recommendation 1)
Open
Education agreed with this recommendation and stated that it will develop a system to track the number of days it takes to refer employment discrimination complaints to EEOC. Education also stated that it will periodically review the new data to identify any effective measures to reduce referral times, and make appropriate changes, depending on available resources. We continue to recommend that Education, in addition to developing the tracking system, use the resulting data and information from the periodic reviews to develop a plan to reduce referral delays. We will monitor the agency's efforts.

Federal Student Loans: Education Should Enhance Reporting on Direct Loan Performance and Risk

GAO-24-106174
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should enhance Education's reporting on its Direct Loan program performance and risk information. Enhanced reporting should include further reporting of sensitivity analyses and other factors, such as performance information, credit risk concentrations, and administrative risks. (Recommendation 1)
Open
Education agreed with this recommendation and stated that the department would assess possible enhancements to reporting on the Direct Loan program performance and risk information. We will monitor the agency's progress.

K-12 Education: Education Could Enhance Oversight of School Improvement Activities

GAO-24-105648
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should update monitoring protocols to ensure that monitoring staff independently select support and improvement plans for review. (Recommendation 1)
Open
Education generally agreed with this recommendation. They plan to begin updating protocols to ensure that staff independently select CSI plans for review in Spring 2024

Artificial Intelligence: Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements

GAO-24-105980
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should ensure that the department develops a plan to either achieve consistency with EO 13960 section 5 for each AI application or retires AI applications found to be developed or used in a manner that is not consistent with the order. (Recommendation 12)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Cybersecurity: Federal Agencies Made Progress, but Need to Fully Implement Incident Response Requirements

GAO-24-105658
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should ensure that the agency fully implements all event logging requirements as directed by OMB guidance. (Recommendation 3)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Student Loans: Education Should Proactively Manage Fraud Risks in Any Future Debt Relief Efforts

GAO-24-107142
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should fully implement all stages of its fraud risk management plans for any future debt relief efforts before approving borrowers for relief. (Recommendation 2)
Open
Education partially concurred with this recommendation. The department disagreed with our assertion that all of these stages needed to be in place before it began providing relief to borrowers. Our report noted that Education's fraud risk management process only works properly when all its major pillars are in place. However, Education was planning to provide relief to millions of borrowers before implementing the review stage, one of three primary stages in the department's application process. This review stage would have provided a critical check on the process as Education provided relief, and would have provided further assurance that Education's fraud management processes were working as intended. The department also said we suggest that it needed to review supplemental tax documentation from all selected high-risk applicants prior to approving any borrowers for relief. That was not the intent of this recommendation: Education should wait on providing relief until it has reviewed sufficient borrower documentation to have reasonable assurance its process for flagging borrowers is working. This would ensure that the review stage provides an effective and essential evaluative check on the program without being overly costly or time-intensive.

Student Loans: Education Should Proactively Manage Fraud Risks in Any Future Debt Relief Efforts

GAO-24-107142
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Education The Secretary of Education should implement controls to avoid relying solely on self-reported data in any future debt relief efforts. (Recommendation 3)
Open
Education partially agreed with this recommendation. Education stated that the debt relief program did not rely solely on self-reported data. While Education noted that affected borrowers were a small portion of eligible borrowers, given the program's size, we still found more than 2 million borrowers whom the department automatically approved based on their self-reported income. Applying the additional fraud mitigation tools Education designed for the application process-which approved most borrowers without the need to provide additional documentation-to borrowers who self-reported their income would present a minimal burden on the department and borrowers. Education also stated that as pandemic-related flexibilities for self-reporting expire, it plans to build capacity for future efforts by implementing data-related upgrades as part of the Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act. Although these efforts could potentially mitigate the risk of relying on self-reported data in future debt relief efforts, they do not affect the previously reported income data from 2020 and 2021, which Education relied on for its original relief program.
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