The Role of Federal Oversight
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Some excerpts from the 2020 GAO "AVIATION SAFETY:
Actions Needed to Evaluate Changes to FAA’s Enforcement Policy on Safety Standards" report: "AA established goals for the Compliance Program—to promote the highest level of safety and compliance with standards and to foster an open, transparent exchange of data. FAA, however, has not taken steps to evaluate if or determine how the program accomplishes these goals." "Due to this new effort, FAA officials from this office said that inspectors tend to identify more violations in the emphasis areas and as a result have taken more compliance actions for these violations." "No specific office or entity is responsible for overseeing the ongoing use of the Compliance Program across FAA. Federal standards for internal control state that an agency should establish structure, assign responsibility, and delegate authority to achieve the agency’s objectives" "Now, as FAA emphasizes compliance actions over enforcement actions, tracking of actions is less centralized and occurs more in individual program offices, according to FAA officials. Without a centralized oversight entity, no one is looking across program offices to identify or share any best practices or lessons learned. We previously reported (1) that the independent nature of FAA offices creates challenges for implementing safety initiatives within FAA and (2) that the agency could improve internal communication to advance safety efforts.34 This observation is also applicable for the Compliance Program, as individual offices have information that might benefit other offices" |
"By regularly collecting and monitoring data on use of the Compliance Program, FAA would also be positioned to use what is found or learned in additional ways, such as sharing information on the program with stakeholders outside the agency.42 Officials from ten industry associations and organizations we spoke with stated they had not seen any data from FAA on the use of the Compliance Program. Officials from two associations noted that FAA had shared only limited data, such as counts of compliance and enforcement actions taken by a single program office. Moreover, officials from one industry association told us that FAA could share more information on the types of actions it takes, or on types of violations that lead to use of enforcement actions each year. The officials explained they could use such information in educational materials for their members."
"Despite this overall positive impression of the Compliance Program from FAA and stakeholders, FAA has not evaluated the effectiveness of the Compliance Program agency-wide and does not plan to do so, according to FAA officials. This situation is consistent with findings and recommendations from our past work that FAA lacked an evaluative process for its prior enforcement policy and other safety programs and initiatives to determine their effect on safety.44 FAA defined overall goals of the Compliance Program when it was announced—to improve compliance with safety standards and improve the open and transparent flow of information and data between it and regulated entities. However, it has not taken steps to evaluate if or determine how the program accomplishes those goals." |