Memorandum audit report on preaward survey of proposed PL-480 Title II commodity assistance for drought relief through Church World Service

480, Title II Food for Work (FFW) commodity assistance for drought relief. Audit report is based on document review and site visits and consists of a preaward survey of Church World Service"s local affiliate, Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA), the proposed program implementor. Audits of previous CASA-operated Title II programs disclosed serious problems in planning, implementation, commodity utilization, and monitoring. In particular, a review of CASA"s past FFW programs revealed indiscriminate approval of project proposals and a failure to assign identification numbers and to keep records in order to prevent duplication of projects and beneficiaries. In a number of cases, the same project had been approved repeatedly over several years. In addition, mistakes have been made in computing person-days of work to be compensated for; consignee cards have been left incomplete; and monthly commodity utilization reports have been both incomplete and full of inaccuracies. The reports also failed to provide information on whether or not the expected benefits were realized or on who would maintain the completed projects. CASA has failed to either review or analyze the reports and its field visit reports have been deficient in both coverage and content and full of apparent contradictions. Five field visits by the auditor failed to disclose a viable basis for CASA"s approval of any of the projects. It is concluded that A.I.D. should not approve the drought assistance program without documentation (e.g., a government request) of the program"s necessity and unless CASA develops acceptable planning, review, approval, implementation, reporting, monitoring, and evaluation procedures and controls and in addition has the trained staff needed to implement the proposed program. Even then, only new projects - preferably a small number of large projects undertaken in conjunction with community or government support - in the drought-affected areas should be considered, to the exclusion of ongoing or questionable efforts.