You know those pages of Consumer Reports magazine that record the packaging and advertising that companies put out that belie the product they're trying to market?
That's what I thought of when I took a look at an audit report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG). Although the report is dated January 29, it was just published on the OIG's website. The report is entitled "CBP's Special Operations Group Program Cost and Effectiveness are Unknown".
It's a straightforward thing, but for the glaring error that can be seen right on the DHS OIG highlights page, which comes just after the title page:
As one can easily see, the left column, highlighted in blue, says, "What We Recommend: We made one recommendation to CBP to develop and implement a process to determine program costs for the SOG."
The text immediately to the right of the blue says, "We made no recommendation regarding the lack of formal performance measures in the SOG program [but that] CBP concurred with our recommendation. The recommendation is resolved and open."
Guess they couldn't decide whether saying "stay the course" was really a recommendation, but were reluctant to issue a report with no recommendations at all. So, hey, why not the best of both worlds?