Review of the USMS Office of Internal Investigations

April 1, 2010 - In this review, the Department of Justice (Department) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) examined the operation of the United States Marshals Service’s (USMS) unit that is responsible for the processing and investigation of allegations of employee misconduct. This unit – the Office of Internal Investigations (OII) – is a part of the USMS’s Office of Inspection. The OIG focused on OII’s investigation of allegations of employee misconduct, OII’s staffing, and the USMS’s management and support of OII.

We found that from fiscal year (FY) 2004 to FY 2009, OII did not meet its 90-day standard for completing misconduct investigations in 51 percent (499) of the cases it closed. Of the 499 investigations that exceeded the standard, 52 (10 percent) took over 9 months, and 18 of those took more than a year to complete. Further, we found that OII is increasingly unable to keep up with its workload. We concluded that OII has not met its timeliness standard for completing misconduct investigations primarily because of persistent understaffing. During our review period, OII had only three of its seven investigator positions filled.

We compared the structure and staffing of the USMS OII to internal investigations offices in other Department agencies and determined that OII is under-resourced, has lower-graded investigator positions, and lacks adequate administrative and analytic support. The lack of adequate staffing in OII results in investigators having caseloads three to five times larger than those of investigators in other Department agencies’ internal investigations offices.

We also found that Deputy U.S. Marshals generally lack interest in applying for OII investigator positions. Current and former OII investigators and USMS management in headquarters and the districts provided several reasons for this reluctance, including the low grade level of the position, the fact that serving in a headquarters rotation is not required as part of a USMS career path or to obtain a promotion in the agency, the high cost of living in the Washington, D.C., area, and a negative perception of internal affairs work.

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http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/USMS/e1003.pdf