Inspectors General Community Launches Oversight.gov

Oversight.gov consolidates over 5,800 reports from over 60 federal watchdogs in one place.

Today marks the launch of Oversight.gov, a centralized and searchable database of reports from offices of the inspector general (OIGs) throughout the federal government. The project is the result of two years of work from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE).

Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice and the Chair of CIGIE, elaborates on the goals of the website in a press release, stating that “the public should have easy access to information about their government, and Oversight.gov is a big step in this direction.”

The database makes it easier to find reports on cross-cutting problems across the government. For instance, a search for “cybersecurity” brings up 448 reports on the topic by dozens of OIGs.

As of Friday, 64 of the 67 OIGs who make their reports public have committed to posting searchable versions of their reports from fiscal years 2015 through 2017 to Oversight.gov. They have also committed to posting all new reports to Oversight.gov whenever they post to their own site moving forward.

The homepage of Oversight.gov has data broken down by fiscal year on the number of reports available, on how many recommendations are in those reports, and on the potential savings identified by IGs. This data automatically updates every time an IG uploads a new report to reflect this new information.

The site also has a “Report Government Fraud, Waste & Abuse” button at the top of every page, which currently links to a list of contact information for all 73 OIGs. CIGIE has hopes of expanding the capacity of this whistleblower assistance functionality by, for example, assigning a full time CIGIE employee to facilitate whistleblower disclosures through the ‘report’ page of the site. However, such plans are contingent on funding.

The Project On Government Oversight has done extensive work to ensure IGs are independent and effective watchdogs, and we believe the introduction of Oversight.gov could serve to help those in the oversight community stay privy to the most recent findings of waste, fraud, and abuse, and to keep IGs accountable.

To keep up with the latest in the IG community, you can check out POGO’s database of vacant IG posts, and follow @OversightGov on Twitter to get live updates whenever new IG reports are available.

Since publishing, POGO has learned that CIGIE has gotten all 67 of the OIGs who make their reports public to join Oversight.gov.