Our audit objective was to assess the process used by the PSOB to make determinations for claims, paying particular attention to claims and appeals that have remained undetermined beyond the BJA Director’s desired PSOB performance metric of 1 year to decide to approve or deny a claim.
We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
We conducted work at Office of Justice Programs offices in Washington, D.C.
We interviewed the PSOB Director, Senior Benefits Specialists, Benefits Specialists, Paralegal Specialists, and Outreach Specialists to gain an understanding of the PSOB claim review process from claim application to determination. We also interviewed the General Counsel of OJP, Deputy General Counsel for the OJP OGC, Senior Litigation Counsel, Attorney Advisors, and the new PSOB Legal Counsel (PSOB Counsel). We also interviewed the Directors of the Concerns for Police Survivors and the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, which support survivors of fallen public safety officers, to understand the role of these organizations in assisting PSOB claimants.
In general, the scope of this audit was defined by the death and disability claims tracked in PSOB’s Office’s electronic spreadsheet database as of July 29, 2013.38 These claims included 1,845 claims that had been determined (1,200 approved claims, 645 denied claims) and 650 pending claims. We sampled claims for review by calculating the time elapsed between the date PSOB assigned a claim number and its initial claim determination.39 We produced and analyzed general statistics for the 2,510 claims, reviewed 92 claims files and notes, and completed a detailed review of 55 claims to identify factors that contributed to delays in claims processing and determinations. In January 2014, we completed fieldwork to determine the status of claim determinations submitted to and concurred with by the new PSOB Counsel and those that were pending at the time of the re-delegation of concurrence authority in May 2013. Table 2 shows the number and status of the 2,129 claims received by the PSOB Office between FY 2008 and FY 2013, as of July 29, 2013.40
38 In addition to death and disability claims, OJP is also responsible for processing education claims submitted by dependents of death and disability claimants. We have not included education claims in our testing as we assessed risk to these types of claims as low.
39 Excluded from the total were 15 claims abandoned or withdrawn by claimants.
40 In addition to claims submitted since FY 2008, the PSOB Office’s database included an additional 381 claims submitted in earlier years that we also considered in our analysis that included 102 claims submitted in FY 2007, 113 claims submitted in FY 2006, 90 claims submitted in FY 2005,
Table 2
Source: OIG analysis of PSOB Office data.
We determined that the majority of claims we reviewed in the PSOB Office database were death claims, which accounted for 2,069 claims or 83 percent of all claims. The remaining 441 claims, or 17 percent, were disability claims. In
addition, we determined the largest single type of death claim in the database was those related to the Hometown Heroes Act. These 795 Hometown Heroes Act claims made up 32 percent of all death claims.
We analyzed the claims in the PSOB database to identify those claims that experienced the most significant delays in recent years. In total, we identified 140 pending, approved, and denied claims for testing that indicated timeliness problems.42 We determined that 33 of the 140 were September 11th-related death and disability claims. Of the 33 claims, we did not consider 22 claims in our review because these claims were not submitted by the PSOB Office to the OJP OGC as of
67 claims in FY 2004, 3 claims submitted in both FY 2003 and FY 2001, and 1 claim submitted in FYs 2002, 1999, and 1996. A total of two claims were abandoned in 2007 and one claim was withdrawn in both FYs 2004 and 2007.
41 This table does not include 1 abandoned and 10 withdrawn claims.
42 Of the 140 claims we selected, 2 were submitted in FY 2011, 47 were submitted in FY 2010, 58 were submitted in FY 2009, 18 were submitted in FY 2008, 10 were submitted in FY07, 3 were submitted in FY 2006 and 1 claim was submitted for both FY 2002 and FY 2001.
July 2013. We did not consider the remaining 11 September 11th-related claims because the PSOB Office and OJP OGC continued to work towards creating a consistent approach for processing these nonroutine type claims involving medical conditions and privately contracted hospital rescue squads and ambulance crews.
Therefore, we excluded these claims from our consideration of the most delayed PSOB claims to focus on claims that may represent routine processing issues. In addition, we identified 15 pending claim determinations that had not been
submitted to the OJP OGC for concurrence because the PSOB Office had not yet completed its review of those claims.
In total, we reviewed 92 of the 140 claims determinations that were submitted to the OJP OGC for concurrence and completed a detailed analysis of 55 claims.