Dive Brief:
- An inspector general report has found that the U.S. General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service has a backlog of occupational health, safety and fire risk conditions it has not addressed for more than 10 years.
- As of November 2023, the GSA’s Public Buildings Service had a backlog of 35,955 actionable, open risk conditions including unresolved fire, safety and health risk conditions across 1,981 assets nationwide, dating as far back as Oct. 1, 2013, the Office of Inspector General said in an audit memorandum to PBS Commissioner Elliot Doomes Aug. 29. Additionally, 5,131 of these conditions were not addressed or did not have an abatement plan in place within the 30-day period required by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, according to the memo.
- To protect building occupants and federal property, the OIG recommends that the PBS address unsafe or hazardous risk conditions across GSA-managed assets in “a timely manner.” Furthermore, the OIG recommends that PBS policies and procedures for managing, correcting, mitigating and closing out open risk conditions should “promote the effective and timely resolution of health, safety, and fire risks.”
Dive Insight:
The OIG gathered data from the PBS in response to a hotline complaint made last June, which alleged that the GSA is violating OSHA employee health and safety regulations.
“Based on our assessment of the hotline complaint, we concluded that the complaint had merit,” the OIG memo says.
For instance, the Charles E. Chamberlain Federal Building and U.S. Post Office in Lansing, Michigan was found to lack a fire sprinkler system, nearly seven years after it was identified as highly vulnerable to fires during a fire protection survey in March 2017. As of November 2023, no abatement plan or corrective actions had been entered into the GSA’s inventory reporting information system, or IRIS, according to the audit memo.
In a separate example, the OIG discovered that as of November 2023, no corrective action or abatement plan had been put in place following a safety survey in 2019 that found falling stone from a facade of the One White Flint North building in Bethesda, Maryland, despite the surveyor’s observation that the falling stone “posed an immediate and potentially imminent danger to employees and the public,” the OIG said in its memo.
Further, 535 physical assets nationwide were found to be affected by open risk conditions that were not addressed within the 30-day requirement. On average, PBS’s data shows that it took nearly three years to put an abatement plan in place to address these open risk conditions, the OIG said.
An example of a long-standing open risk condition that was not addressed within OSHA’s 30-day deadline is the failure to test fire dampers within the required time frame after a fire protection survey was completed at a federal building in Washington, D.C. in October 2016, the OIG said. It noted that the PBS developed an abatement plan to update its test certification from the lessor only last October — nearly seven years later.
According to the memo, a facilities risk management director told OIG that the PBS added a performance measure to the annual performance plans of over 1,300 of its employees in 2021 to track compliance and that an end-of-year analysis of risk conditions is conducted and presented to various stakeholder groups within the GSA. However, the PBS’s own data suggests otherwise, the OIG indicated.
“Over the last 26 years, PBS has documented and closed 57,603 risk conditions and will continue to prioritize funding to support the closure of additional risk items,” Doomes wrote to Rolando Goco, assistant inspector general for auditing at OIG, in response to the memo.
Earlier this year, the GSA requested $425 million as part of President Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2025 budget to support a program aimed at reconfiguring and renovating federal buildings.
In his response to the memo, Doomes requested full access to the federal buildings fund proposed in the GSA’s fiscal year 2025 budget, to “support a more timely closure of open risk conditions.”
In terms of meeting OSHA’s 30-day deadline, Doomes said the PBS acknowledges this issue and will continue to address it and pointed to measures the PBS has already undertaken such as the annual performance plan. He also noted the PBS’s latest iteration of a risk tracking tool that, unlike previous versions, allows users to check if risk conditions have been corrected, or whether they have abatement plans, within 30 calendar days.
