IG Horowitz Report on a DOJ Grant Awarded to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the 2016 Democratic National Convention Transcript: “A Message from the Inspector General: Report on a DOJ Grant Awarded to  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the 2016 Democratic National Convention,” September 2018 Hello, I’m Michael Horowitz, Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice.  Today, our office released a report assessing a 49 million dollar Justice Department grant to  assist the city of Philadelphia in providing security for the 2016 Democratic National  Convention. We’ve conducted similar audits of convention grants made to various cities since  2004, and earlier this year we released our audit of the grant made to the city of Cleveland for  the 2016 Republican National Convention.  We found significant deficiencies in Philadelphia’s management of the grant funds, and overall,  we identified over 14 million dollars in unallowable or unsupported expenditures. We found  that Philadelphia didn’t have effective internal controls for grant administration. For example,  subrecipient partners of the grant award, which included state and local law enforcement and  the local public transit authority, did not have valid agreements with Philadelphia. And the city  did not ensure that expenditures from these partners were accurate; which led to us to identify over 7 million dollars in questioned costs.  We also found that certain actions by the Host Committee, a subrecipient of the grant award,  could have created the appearance of improper political influence and had the potential to  negatively impact the public’s confidence in the integrity of the grant program.  We identified several other issues related to Philadelphia’s management of the grant funds, all  of which are detailed in today’s report.  To read the report, please visit our website oig.justice.gov, or go to Oversight.gov. Thank you  for joining us.