SBA’s Corrective Actions to Improve Monitoring District Offices’ Customer Service Activities

We inspected the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) corrective actions for four recommendations from the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) audit report SBA’s District Offices’ Customer Service to determine whether SBA’s corrective actions had effectively been implemented. A verification inspection is a short review that focuses on closed recommendations from prior OIG reports. Our objective was to determine the effectiveness of corrective actions SBA implemented to assess customer service at district offices and track and measure customer service activities.

SBA effectively implemented corrective actions for three of the four recommendations made by OIG. These corrective actions were implemented through its Goals and Measures Activity Tracking Tool system, which records customer outreach activities. We determined the Goals and Measures Activity Tracking Tool system has better functionality than the previous system, the Activity Contact Report. The new system also includes controls that allow for hierarchical reviews of recorded activities. Further, management enforced the policy for district office officials to record customer outreach activities in the system in a timely manner. However, program officials have not fully implemented a process to collect and analyze customer feedback.

We will track management’s implementation by reopening the recommendation and will work with SBA to establish a target date for implementing corrective actions through the audit follow-up process.