Federal Protective Service: Actions Needed to Resolve Delays and Inadequate Oversight Issues with FPS's Risk Assessment and Management Program

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Protective Service (FPS), which is within the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), is responsible for protecting the more than 1 million federal employees and members of the public who work in and visit the over 9,000 federal facilities owned or leased by the General Services Administration (GSA) from a potential terrorist attack or other acts of violence. To accomplish its facility protection mission, FPS has about 1,200 full-time employees and approximately 13,200 contract security guards. FPS has an annual budget of about $1 billion and receives its funding from the revenues and collections of security fees charged to tenant agencies for protective services such as facility security assessments (FSA) and providing contract security guard services. Since 2008, we have issued numerous reports that address major challenges FPS faces in protecting federal facilities. For example, in 2009 and 2010 we reported that FPS had problems completing high-quality FSAs in a timely manner and did not provide adequate oversight of its contract guard program. In September 2007, FPS decided to address the challenges with its legacy security assessment and guard management systems with a new system. On August 1, 2008, DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) competitively awarded and FPS funded a $21 million, 7-year contract to develop and maintain the Risk Assessment and Management Program (RAMP) system. RAMP is a web-enabled risk assessment and guard management system, and its initial implementation was scheduled for July 31, 2009. Among other things, RAMP is intended to: (2) provide FPS with the capability to assess risks at federal facilities based on threat, vulnerability, and consequence, and track countermeasures to mitigate those risks; and (2) improve the agency's ability to monitor and verify that its contract security guards are trained and certified to be deployed to federal facilities. In response to congressional request that we examine RAMP, this report addresses the following questions: (1) What is RAMP's current status, including whether it can be used as planned? (2) What are the factors that contributed to this status? (3) What are the actions FPS is taking to develop and implement RAMP?