A Vehicle Went Six Years Without Required Maintenance
Summary
The Justice Department's Justice Management Division runs an 88-vehicle -leased fleet for offices with no dedicated fleet manager. In a 27-vehicle sample, the Inspector General found 13 overdue for preventive maintenance -- the worst 2,313 days past due -- and 4 carrying open safety recalls, the longest unaddressed for 2,121 days.
A fleet nobody is assigned to run
The Justice Management Division's Facilities and Administrative Services Staff manages an 88-vehicle GSA-leased fleet⧉ for eight offices with no dedicated fleet manager -- including the Solicitor General, Tax Division, and Office of Justice Programs. The , by comparison, runs 26,359 vehicles⧉ with its own dedicated managers -- a fleet roughly 300 times larger.
The July 2026 DOJ Inspector General audit⧉ found every vehicle it physically checked was where it should be. What was missing was the paperwork that keeps a fleet safe, right-sized, and honestly billed.
In a judgmental sample of 27 vehicles⧉, 13 were overdue for preventive maintenance and 4 carried an open safety recall as of June 30, 2025 -- the longest recall, unaddressed for 2,121 days⧉, dated to September 9, 2019.
View data as table
| Inconsistent mileage reporting | 14 | Fleet system fell back to estimated mileage |
|---|---|---|
| Overdue preventive maintenance | 13 | |
| Open safety recall | 4 |
Maintenance schedules run on mileage, and mileage was often missing: 14 of the 27 sampled vehicles⧉ reported it inconsistently, forcing 's system to substitute estimates for real odometer readings. Only 36 of the 88 vehicles⧉ auto-report mileage via telematics; the rest depend on a driver remembering to log it.
View data as table
| Mail & Warehouse Section | 2,313 | Due March 1, 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency Planning (vehicle A) | 2,162 | Due July 30, 2019 |
| Emergency Planning (vehicle B) | 1,125 | Due June 1, 2022 |
| Solicitor General | 1,060 | Due August 5, 2022 |
JMD had also not built a vehicle allocation methodology⧉ or run a utilization review, both required by federal regulation, to establish whether 88 vehicles is even the right number. Two Mail & Warehouse trucks sat inoperable -- one over a year, one over two -- while JMD kept paying lease costs⧉ on both.
- In a 27-vehicle sample, the Inspector General found 13 vehicles overdue for preventive maintenance and 4 with open safety recalls -- the longest lapses 2,313 days (maintenance) and 2,121 days (recall) as of June 30, 2025.
- The 88-vehicle fleet is managed for eight offices that have no dedicated fleet manager, and JMD had built no vehicle allocation methodology to judge whether the fleet is correctly sized -- a gap that is administrative, not the fault of any one office.
- Inconsistent mileage reporting on more than half the sample left 's own fleet system generating estimates instead of odometer data, degrading both billing and the maintenance schedule that mileage drives.
- JMD concurred with all four recommendations and reported returning the two inoperable trucks to ; the report is marked resolved pending evidence the fixes are in place.
Figures are drawn from the 's judgmental sample of 27 vehicles and the full 88-vehicle inventory; a judgmental sample is not statistically projectable to the whole fleet. "Days lapsed" are the 's own counts as of June 30, 2025. This is a held draft prepared for editor review.
Sources(3) ▾
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, Audit of the Justice Management Division's Fleet Management Program (Report 26-072) (2026-07-28) — The primary audit. Establishes the 88-vehicle OBD fleet with no dedicated fleet manager, the 27-vehicle judgmental sample, the 13 overdue-maintenance and 4 open-recall counts, the 2,313-day and 2,121-day lapses, the 14-of-27 inconsistent-mileage finding that pushed 's fleet system onto estimates, the absent vehicle allocation methodology, and the two inoperable trucks. All load-bearing figures are drawn from its Results in Brief, Audit Results, and Table 1. oig.justice.gov · original document
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, DOJ OIG Releases Report on the Audit of the Justice Management Division's Fleet Management Program (2026-07-28) — The 's own release announcing the report on July 28, 2026. Corroborates the 88-vehicle count, the 27-vehicle sample, and the four-recall / thirteen-overdue-maintenance headline finding stated in the audit. oig.justice.gov · original document
- Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (Oversight.gov), Audit of the Justice Management Division's Fleet Management Program (CIGIE Oversight.gov copy) (2026-07-28) — The identical report as re-published on the federal Oversight.gov repository. Used as an independent host to corroborate the issuer-hosted PDF's figures during blind verification. oversight.gov · original document
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A Justice Department vehicle came due for preventive maintenance on March 1, 2019. When auditors checked more than six years later, on June 30, 2025, it still had not been done -- 2,313 days past due. It was the far end of a pattern, not an outlier.