Every year, the Government Accountability Office publishes a few hundred reports informing the rest of the federal government that it is not managing its money correctly. GAO tells the Department of Education it has no idea how absentee students actually are. GAO tells ICE it built detention capacity before it built a plan. GAO tells VA it built a hospital on a business case that never existed. This is the job.
Congress created GAO in 1921 specifically so somebody, anybody, could look at agency spending and say “no, actually, that’s wrong,” and for over a century the agency has done this with the confident air of an institution that has never once made the mistake it is currently describing.
On September 25, 2026, GAO’s own Office of Inspector General published OIG-26-3, “Acquisition Management: Opportunities Exist for GAO to Strengthen Its Policies and Procedures.” It examined a five-year, $119 million blanket purchase agreement GAO itself signed in 2019 for commercial facility maintenance, meaning the people who clean and repair GAO’s own building.
The OIG’s finding is that GAO could not manage this contract correctly, could not explain why, and when confronted with the error, fixed it incorrectly.
The Rates Nobody Adjusted
In February 2021, the maintenance contractor told GAO its labor rates were going up. This is not an unusual event in federal contracting; it happens when a contractor’s workforce operates under a collective bargaining agreement, as this one did. The contracting officer and the contracting officer’s representative, the two officials whose entire function is to keep the paperwork aligned with reality, received this notice before the contractor started invoicing at the new rates.
They did not modify the contract. They approved the invoices anyway. Over 18 invoices, GAO paid $93,688 more than the rates actually written into its own agreement, a gap the OIG could measure category by category, $4.39 an hour too much here, $3.96 there, and so on, compounding invisibly because nobody stopped to check that the number on the invoice matched the number in the contract.
Asked why, GAO could not say. The contracting officer responsible had left the agency by the time anyone asked the question, which is its own small monument to institutional memory (the person who might explain a mistake is gone, and the explanation left with them). The OIG also notes, almost as an aside, that the contracting officer’s representative believed updating an individual task order was sufficient to fix the underlying agreement, which it was not, a misunderstanding that apparently went unquestioned by everyone else in the chain until an auditor arrived to ask about it.
The Correction That Corrected the Wrong Thing
GAO does deserve some credit here, in the sense that when the OIG flagged the overpayment in February 2023, the agency did not deny it. It modified the contract retroactively in May 2023 to apply the higher rates across the remaining option years. This would be the end of the story, a minor embarrassment quietly fixed, except that the fix excluded two of the specific contract line items that contained the labor rates for the very 18 invoices under review. GAO corrected the contract everywhere except the part the audit was actually about.
The agency has since asserted, per its own comments reproduced in the report, that this was addressed and that documentation was provided to the OIG in August 2026, three and a half years after the contractor first flagged the rate change and well over a year after the audit period closed. The OIG’s own report, dated the same month, states flatly that GAO “has not provided supporting evidence” that the correction covers the line items in question.
Whether the August paperwork actually closes that gap is something GAO’s own auditors have not yet confirmed as of publication, which is a remarkable place for an accountability agency to leave its own accountability.
Guidance That Guides Nobody
The overpayment is the number that will get quoted, but the more instructive findings are the two that never touched a dollar figure at all. GAO’s internal procurement rules, the OIG found, offer no clear standard for evaluating whether a contractor is charging excessive markups on work actually performed by a subcontractor, the practice known in acquisition law as an excessive pass-through charge.
GAO is not legally required to follow the Federal Acquisition Regulation’s language on this, but it has chosen, as a matter of policy, to generally follow it anyway, and then failed to write down what “following it” means in practice. GAO agreed its own guidance needed updating. It did not have an answer for why, in a hundred-plus years of federal contracting oversight, this had not been written down already.
The second is almost funnier. One GAO internal order says the agency follows competitive negotiation procedures when buying through the General Services Administration’s Schedule program. GAO’s own standard operating procedure says the opposite, that those procedures do not apply to Schedule purchases. Two official GAO documents, both still in effect, instructing staff to do contradictory things, and nobody had reconciled them until an auditor read both at once. GAO agreed this was unclear too.
The Footnote That Undercuts Everything Else
Buried in a footnote is the detail that makes the rest of the report worth reading twice. GAO issued an updated version of its Acquisition Management/Procurement Operations standard operating procedures on May 11, 2026, four months before this report’s release, and the OIG states plainly that the update “does not address the issues identified in this report.”
GAO had the opportunity, mid-audit, to fix the very guidance the OIG was in the process of criticizing, and did not. The agency then submitted written comments in September concurring with all six recommendations and promising further updates, training, and a new SOP addressing pass-through charges, with a completion date of March 2027 for the recommendations that remain open.
None of this rises to fraud. Nobody pocketed the $93,688; it went to a contractor’s employees who were, by all accounts, owed the raise. The offense here is narrower and in some ways more honest, an agency whose entire institutional purpose is catching other agencies failing to reconcile their own paperwork, failing to reconcile its own paperwork, for the same reasons it always cites when writing about everyone else.
Insufficient oversight of contract modifications.
Unclear internal guidance.
A responsible official no longer available to explain the gap.
Read GAO’s finding about ICE’s bed-space contracts, or VA’s Louisville hospital, or the Department of Education’s chronically absent students, and then read this report, and the sentences are nearly interchangeable. The watchdog did not find a new species of failure. It found its own.
Source: GAO Office of Inspector General, report OIG-26-3, published September 25, 2026.
