Summary: More than 70 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) budget is used to award grants and contracts. Once a grant or contract is completed or terminated and once the applicable budget or project period has expired, the agency must determine if the required work was completed and then close out the project, which includes making any final payments due the recipient. One of the primary purposes of closing out grants and contracts is to ensure that any unliquidated obligated funds are recovered and used for environmental programs. These unliquidated funds represent millions of dollars that EPA could use to fund other environmental programs. The timely closeout of grants and contracts is a long-standing problem for EPA. EPA has developed several initiatives to reduce the number, or backlog, of inactive grants and contracts requiring closeout. This report discusses (1) EPA's efforts to close out inactive grants and contracts; (2) EPA's progress in reducing the number of inactive grants and contracts, including the number of remaining inactive grants and contracts, and the dates by which they are expected to be closed out; and (3) the amount of unliquidated obligations for inactive grants and contracts.
