Audit of Health Centers' Use of COVID-19 Supplemental Grant Funding and Reimbursement From the HRSA COVID-19 Uninsured Program

OBJECTIVE

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) awarded supplemental grant funding totaling approximately $8.1 billion to 1,387 health centers nationwide in fiscal years 2020 through 2022 to respond to the COVID-19 public health emergency. The funding was intended to support the health centers' activities related to the detection, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of COVID-19, including expanding COVID-19 testing and administering COVID-19 vaccines. Separately, during the same period, the HRSA Uninsured Program (UIP) reimbursed providers more than $24.5 billion for conducting COVID-19 diagnostic testing and providing testing-related items and services to uninsured individuals. The UIP terms and conditions stated that recipients should consider payments from the UIP to be payment in full for COVID-19 testing and/or testing-related items, vaccine administration, care, or treatment. According to HRSA, health centers should have accepted any UIP payments as payment in full and should not have charged any of the same costs to their COVID-19 supplemental grant funding, including the difference between the amount claimed to the UIP and the amount they were reimbursed by the UIP. Prior OIG work identified that some health centers charged costs for processing COVID-19 tests to their COVID-19 supplemental grant funding and also submitted claims and received reimbursement for the same services from the UIP. We will determine if health centers that submitted claims for COVID-19 testing and received reimbursement from the UIP also received reimbursement from grant funding for the same costs.

TIMELINE

REPORT PUBLISHED