PBS Is Not Consistently Complying with Its Internal Guidance for the Building Assessment Tool, Resulting in Underreported Liabilities and Increasing the Risk of Errors

Why We Performed This Audit

Building maintenance liabilities are the current estimated costs to repair building deficiencies to an acceptable condition. GSA is required to identify and report its building maintenance liabilities annually. Accurate, complete, and reliable building maintenance liability data is critical to GSA because it: (1) directly affects its financial reporting; (2) informs its long-term capital planning; and (3) supports decisions about funding, prioritizing, and executing repairs across GSA’s building portfolio.

GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS) uses the Building Assessment Tool (BAT) system to estimate the cost of repairs and maintenance needed to correct major deficiencies in GSA-owned buildings, as well as in certain leased buildings for which GSA is responsible for repairs and alterations. PBS prepares this estimate using BAT surveys, which are 40-section surveys completed by a PBS employee based on physical inspections of individual GSA buildings.
BAT surveys were previously completed on a 2-year cycle; however, because PBS underwent significant staffing reductions and a major reorganization in 2025, it now requires BAT surveys to be completed on a 5-year cycle. The longer interval between BAT surveys increases the risk of outdated building maintenance liability data, making it critically important that PBS’s BAT surveys are complete, accurate, and reliable.

Due to the importance of the BAT system to PBS’s management of its building portfolio, we included this audit on the GSA Office of Inspector General’s Fiscal Year 2025 Audit Plan. The objective of the audit was to determine whether PBS is effectively using the BAT system to monitor the costs of building repairs and maintenance in accordance with internal guidance.
 

What We Found

PBS is not consistently complying with the internal guidance it designed to ensure that the estimated costs of building repairs and maintenance in the BAT system are complete and accurate, resulting in underreported building maintenance liabilities and increasing the risk of undetected errors.

Specifically, we found that:

• PBS did not consistently review existing data sources for repair and alteration costs when preparing some BAT surveys, resulting in underreported building maintenance liabilities. We found that 79 of the BAT surveys in our sample of 196 buildings underreported repair and alteration costs by a total of $73 million.
• PBS did not consistently perform independent completeness and accuracy reviews of BAT surveys, thereby increasing the risk of undetected errors.

Taken together, these deficiencies limit assurance that PBS consistently uses and reports complete, accurate, and reliable information on the repair and maintenance needs of its building portfolio.

What We Recommend

We recommend that the PBS Commissioner:

1. Improve oversight of the BAT surveys by:
   1. Ensuring surveyors and approvers have access to the building maintenance liability information contained in the Inventory Reporting Information System (IRIS) Prioritization of Asset Repair (PAR) and IRIS Work Items (WI) modules.
   2. Requiring surveyors and approvers to review the building maintenance liability information contained in the IRIS PAR and IRIS WI modules when completing and reviewing BAT surveys.
2. Strengthen quality control procedures by incorporating reviews of the building maintenance liability information contained in the IRIS PAR and IRIS WI modules into the annual variance analysis, particularly for BAT surveys reporting zero liabilities.
3. Require a separate surveyor and approver for each BAT survey, clearly document both roles in the BAT system, and ensure each PBS employee performs only the duties of their assigned role. This should include, at a minimum:
   1. Implementing controls to: (1) prevent a BAT survey from being completed and approved by the same person and (2) provide clear guidance to all BAT users regarding separating duties and independent approval expectations.
   2. Updating the February 2026 BAT internal guidance to explicitly prohibit any individual from serving as both surveyor and approver for the same BAT survey.

The PBS Acting Commissioner stated that PBS agrees with the report recommendations. His written comments are included in their entirety in Appendix C.