“The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is issuing this Flash Audit Alert to bring to your immediate attention serious concerns we have regarding the Office of the Chief Information Officer’ s (OCIO) infrastructure improvement project (Project). This Project includes a full overhaul ofthe agency’s technical infrastructure by implementing additional information technology (IT) security controls and then migrating the entire infrastructure into a completely new environment (referred to as Shell). Our primary concern is that the OCIO has not followed U.S . Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requirements and project management best practices. The OCIO has initiated this project without a complete understanding ofthe scope of OPM’ s existing technical infrastructure or the scale and costs of the effort required to migrate it to the new environment. In addition, we have concerns with the nontraditional Government procurement vehicle that was used to secure a sole-source contract with a vendor to manage the infrastructure overhaul. While we agree that the sole-source contract may have been appropriate for the initial phases of securing the existing technical environment, we do not agree that it is appropriate to use this vehicle for the long-term system migration efforts. We intend to conduct further oversight of this Project and may issue additional reports in the future. However, we have identified substantial issues requiring immediate action, and we are therefore issuing the following recommendations in this Flash Audit Alert, so that the OCIO can immediately begin taking steps to address these concerns. We provided a draft of this Alert to the OCIO for their review, but we did not receive any comments.”