Peace Corps’ Payroll Audit Flagged $492,644. $471,815 Remains Open.

The Peace Corps' Office of Inspector General audited, in November 2022,⧉ how the agency pays and manages benefits for its U.S. direct-hire (USDH) staff -- the roughly $135 million a year that moves through the National Finance Center to pay locality rates, within-grade increases, retirement contributions, and separation benefits.▸ It identified $474,644 in questioned costs and $18,000 in funds that could be put to better use -- $492,644 across 30 recommendations, all of which management concurred with.

Three years and four months later, the OIG's own semiannual report to Congress for the period ending March 31, 2026⧉ still lists 18 of those 30 recommendations open -- and $471,815 of the original $492,644, or 96 percent, is still sitting unresolved on the agency's own books.

It was not the OIG's first pass at this ledger.▸ A 2020 audit of the Peace Corps' FY2019 improper-payment reporting⧉ had already found the agency's own reported improper-payment estimate for USDH payroll -- $93,000 -- understated OIG's recalculated figure of $256,329 by $163,329, because the Office of Human Resources Management (HRM) could not produce documentation showing how its own number was derived.

The 2022 audit went deeper: HRM had not properly updated duty-station records for 14 employees, failed to recoup an $18,000 salary advance within the required 18 pay periods, waived 18 salary overpayments without proper authority, and could not retain required hiring files for 24 employees.▸ Two employees, the audit found, had received a combined $135,612 in payments HRM said corrected "duplicate credits" from 2018 and 2019 -- except no 2019 payroll file actually showed those credits, so neither HRM nor the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) could verify or document the payments as allowable.

The single largest line running through the audit was retirement.▸ HRM had already conducted its own internal review of retirement categories back in 2019 and submitted waivers for 24 employees -- but by the time OIG's 2022 audit closed, it found the same category of error had continued: 81 employees were still sitting in incorrect retirement categories between January 2019 and September 2021, and the agency's own contribution rate was wrong for 61 of them. Recommendation 28 alone -- refunding employees who were overcharged $153,738 in retirement deductions -- and Recommendation 30 -- correcting $112,690 in the agency's own miscalculated retirement contributions -- account for more than half of everything still open.

Checking the OIG's own standardized reporting register against itself shows the pace of closure: 29 of 30 recommendations were still open at issuance in November 2022; 19 of 30 were open as of the semiannual report covering April through September 2025⧉; 18 of 30 remained open in the OIG's most current report, covering October 2025 through March 2026.▸ One recommendation closed in that entire six-month window.

Three of the ten dollar-denominated recommendations have dropped off the OIG's open-items table since 2022: Recommendation 2's $1,550 in locality-rate overpayments, Recommendation 24's combined $1,279 in unallowable hazard pay and post-separation health benefits, and Recommendation 7's $18,000 uncollected salary advance -- $20,829 total, about 4 percent of what the audit originally flagged.▸ Everything else -- the underpaid locality pay owed to three employees, the delayed within-grade increases, the unreconciled duplicate-credit payments, and the retirement-contribution corrections owed in both directions -- is unchanged from the dollar figures the OIG printed in November 2022. The Peace Corps concurred with all 30 recommendations at the outset; concurrence has not, on this ledger, meant collection.