Army Fee Assistance Program: Part II

PURPOSE:

·To examine the status of remediation efforts to reduce program backlog in the Army Fee Assistance (AFA) program.
·To examine Army’s plan to transition the program back to its prior administrator, Child Care Aware of America (CCAoA).

BACKGROUND:

·The AFA program helps qualifying Army members with the cost of off-post child care when reasonable on-post child care is unavailable.
·In early 2014, the Army shifted responsibility for program administration away from a private contractor (CCAoA) to the General Services Administration (GSA); however, mishandling of program administration ensued.
·On September 8, 2015, the GSA Inspector General released a final audit report detailing the full extent of GSA’s mismanagement, including a backlog of 25,900 items and multiple IT security breaches potentially exposing 8,000 families’ personal identifiable information.
·This hearing is a follow-up to last September’s hearing, “GSA: Army Fee Assistance Program”, where the U.S. Army senior executive responsible for the program, Ms. Stephanie Hoehne, testified that the child care program should be at a sustainable rate by December (2015), and will not be managed by GSA beginning in 2016.