The U.S. Homeland Security Department uses an enormous set of databases to make decisions about border security, immigration enforcement and other critical issues.
But a new Inspector General analysis says officials have been lacking the best data to make decisions.
The independent watchdog found widespread data quality issues in a summary of dozens of smaller reports from the late Obama era, through much of the Trump presidency.
The report says Homeland Security officials sometimes relied on wrong or not enough information to do their jobs. The negative effect was reportedly felt in areas like cybersecurity, immigration, border enforcement, financial reporting and disaster aid.
Homeland Security’s initial reply called the Inspector General’s summary misleading, based on stale information and pointed to recent improvements made in data management.
