The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently completed one of its audits of COVID-19 relief funds. The focus of this audit was on the automatic Provider Relief Fund (PRF) payments Medicare providers received in April 2020 from the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA). In general, OIG found HRSA did a good job of properly calculating and disbursing the PRF payments to eligible providers with less than a 1% error rate.

OIG notes that due to the desire to rapidly disburse funds to struggling providers in the early days of the pandemic, some adjustments to the payments were overlooked such as failing to account for the 2% sequestration reduction, or irregular cost reporting data; and some ineligible providers were paid. OIG made some recommendations to HRSA regarding improving their  practices in the future and HRSA responded by outlining the steps it has already taken to conduct post-payment quality reviews and recoup improper payments.