Colorado Never Reported 84% of Its Wildlife Grant Subawards

Every federal subaward over $30,000 is supposed to land in a public ledger -- the kind of register that lets a taxpayer, or a journalist, or a state legislator look up exactly which contractor or nonprofit a grant recipient handed money to, and how much.▸ The U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Inspector General⧉ found that Colorado's wildlife agency kept that ledger mostly empty. Of 13 subawards over $30,000 the Colorado Department of Natural Resources was obligated to report during State fiscal years 2023 and 2024, it reported two. The other 11 -- 84 percent, worth $1,275,173 -- simply never appeared⧉, some of them for years.

The money in question comes from the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act and Dingell-Johnson Sport Fish Restoration Act⧉ -- excise taxes on firearms, ammunition, and archery and fishing gear, channeled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into state wildlife programs at up to a 75 percent federal reimbursement rate.▸ Colorado Parks and Wildlife, a division of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, drew on 98 such grants during State fiscal years 2023 and 2024, claiming about $60.4 million in federal expenditures⧉ across that two-year window. When the Division passes a piece of that money further down the chain -- to a contractor, a university, a local partner -- federal rule requires it to post the subaward to a public reporting system once the amount clears $30,000, feeding into USASpending.gov. A separate rule requires the State to first check the subrecipient's risk of noncompliance before the money goes out at all.

Colorado's own Office of the State Controller has a policy that mirrors both federal requirements -- a risk-assessment tool to be run on every grantee at least once a grant cycle, and public reporting on schedule.▸ Neither requirement was consistently followed⧉. Of four subawards OIG sampled, worth $565,373 combined, the Division could not produce a documented risk assessment for three of them, worth $490,373⧉ -- meaning the money went out without the check meant to determine how closely it needed to be watched afterward.

The bigger gap sat in public reporting.▸ OIG identified 13 open subawards over $30,000 active during the audit period; the Department failed to report 11 of them, totaling $1,275,173⧉. Reading the grant numbers against FWS's own award-numbering convention, which encodes the fiscal year a grant was set up⧉, the missing entries stretch back to a grant established in fiscal year 2016 -- meaning some subawards sat unreported through the OIG's own prior audit cycle without being caught. Two of the 13 -- worth $425,973 combined -- carry both problems at once: no documented risk assessment, and no public report.

Once OIG raised the gap with the Department, it began fixing it, and by September 2025 the remaining 11 subawards had been reported⧉.▸ The State's own single audits for the same two fiscal years, covering $69.6 million in combined WSFR-related federal expenditures, turned up no findings tied to the program at all⧉ -- the reporting failure sat outside the lens that audit is built to catch, because it is a transparency lapse, not a spending violation. The money itself was not in dispute; the record of where it went, for years, was simply not there to check.

OIG's explanation for the gap was almost administrative in its plainness: neither Division staff nor Department accounting staff were ever required to take training on subaward administration or public reporting⧉, even though both entities already had policies requiring the risk assessments and reports that went missing.▸ The audit's sole recommendation asks FWS to require that training. Both FWS and the Department concurred, and OIG considers the recommendation resolved⧉ -- though not yet implemented, with the Department's target date to close out the paperwork set for August 6, 2026, four months after this report was issued.

This is not the first time OIG has checked this ledger.▸ It followed up on 11 recommendations from a 2020 audit and eight from a 2015 audit of the same Colorado WSFR grants -- including repeat findings on in-kind contributions and property reconciliation -- and found every one of them implemented and resolved⧉. The specific gap this audit found -- subaward risk assessment and public reporting -- was not among those repeat findings. It is new, in a program that has now been checked three times in a decade.