Inspector General Training Courses

FELTG provides training to federal, state and local Inspector General offices, on topics most important to IG operations and efficiency. Any of these programs may be presented onsite, or on a virtual platform. See below for program topics and descriptions.

Looking for a topic that’s not covered here? Contact FELTG’s Training Director Dan Gephart at [email protected] for information on how to bring to a course to your team.

IG-1: Properly Executing Annual Planning and Outreach: A Guide for OIGs (1/2 – 1 day)

Aside from completing a comprehensive OIG strategic plan, annual planning with robust outreach to your stakeholders is the single most important thing an OIG does. When properly executed, OIG annual planning focuses your personnel, time, budget, and oversight resources on the issues that really matter to your agency and the accomplishment of its fundamental missions. We all have limited resources. Therefore, it is imperative that OIGs also conduct continual stakeholder outreach to understand what challenges impede their mission.

FELTG Instructor Scott Boehm, whose federal career included a stint benchmarking for Best Practices within the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), will walk you through the five-step annual planning and outreach process while discussing elusive OIG and agency data sources that too many OIGs overlook. Attendees will leave this session with a template for OIG annual planning and outreach, complete with stakeholder questions that will reduce agency risk and maximize OIG return on investment (ROI).

Course Topics:

• Write succinct project proposals.
• Conduct risk analysis and prioritize potential projects.
• Outline strategies to align potential projects with agency stakeholders.

IG-2: OIG Strategic Planning (1/2-1 day)

All Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs) have mandated quality standards and “should strive to conduct their operation in the most efficient and effective manner.  Each OIG should manage available resources, at the least cost, to produce the greatest results in terms of public benefit, return on investment, and risk reduction.” OIGs cannot accomplish this mission if they lack a robust strategic planning process. Because OIGs continually examine their agency’s internal controls for efficiency and effectiveness, they must also periodically examine their own.

Strategic planning ensures that your OIG resources (budgets, personnel, infrastructure, training, and time) are focused on accomplishing the mission, reducing risk, and maximizing return on investment (ROI) and public benefit.

FELTG Instructor Scott Boehm provides a thorough review of the strategic planning process, complete with examples from his federal OIG experience.  He will then tailor the process to address the specific requirements of all OIGs. These include clarifying the methodology, participants and their contributions, pre-session inputs, deliverables and timelines. He will discuss the OIG’s “Values Scan” and then the “Mandate Analysis” that gives the office its statutory or administrative authorities.  He will also show how to formulate the OIG Mission Statement while reviewing the agency’s strategic plan. Scott will discuss the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis and the OIG Vision formulation. He will demonstrate how to formulate OIG strategic goals and the strategies that get your OIG to the desired outcome, and then show how to formulate the plan of actions and milestones (POA&M) and develop the metrics that tell where your OIG is and where it needs to go in the next two-to-three years to increase its efficiency and effectiveness.

Course Topics:

• Understand the OIG strategic planning process
• Outline the strategic planning methodology, participants and their contributions, pre-session inputs, deliverables and timelines.
• Explain an OIG’s “Values Scan” and “Mandate Analysis”
• Demonstrate how to formulate the OIG Mission and Vision Statements and conduct SWOT analysis
• Explain how to formulate OIG strategic goals and the strategies that support those goals
• Demonstrate how to formulate the POA&M and develop metrics to measure OIG progress toward accomplishing the strategic goals

IG-3: An OIG Guide to Benchmarking for Best Practices (1/2-1 day)

Every Office of Inspector General should periodically conduct benchmarking for Best Practices with other OIGs. No OIG has all the answers or “perfect internal controls” and should, therefore, regularly seek better business practices from peer organizations. Both the “Silver Book” for federal, and the “Green Book” for state and local OIGs, state: “OIGs should strive to conduct their operation in the most efficient and effective manner. Each OIG should manage available resources, at the least cost, to produce the greatest results in terms of public benefit, return on investment, and risk reduction.”

Benchmarking ensures your limited OIG resources – budgets, personnel, supplies, infrastructure, training, and time – are focused on the issues that really matter to your agency.

FELTG Instructor Scott Boehm, whose federal career included benchmarking for Best Practices within the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), will walk you through the benchmarking process. Attendees will leave this session with an OIG benchmarking template that can improve your OIG’s annual planning process; audit, investigation and evaluation handbooks; product lines and report production; return on investment (ROI); and follow-up processes.

Course Topics:

• Plan and coordinate benchmarking with other OIGs
• Conduct risk analysis and prioritize the OIG internal controls requiring the most improvement
• Outline strategies to incorporate Best Practices into their OIG internal controls and peer review quality standards

IG-4: An OIG Guide to Measuring Return on Investment (1/2-1 day)

All statutory OIGs, whether in federal, state or local government, must regularly report their return on investment (ROI) to their state legislature or to Congress. This ensures that the OIG is focused on the tax dollars that fund it and the tangible efficiencies that OIG recommendations save the taxpayer. The Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, requires OIGs to include in their semiannual reports to Congress, two categories of monetary impacts for audits, inspections, and evaluations:

• Questioned costs (with unsupported costs and disallowed costs as subsets)
• And recommendation(s) that funds be put to better use

Many state and local legislatures have similar requirements.

OIGs with a large ROI continually validate their “worth” to their legislature, Agency and the taxpayer.  However, these arcane terms are often open to interpretation, and many OIGs struggle with quantifying their monetary savings to their taxpayers.

FELTG Instructor Scott Boehm, whose federal career included benchmarking to determine Best Practices for measuring savings and ROI within the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), will walk you through the process. Attendees will receive multiple examples from federal OIG staff actuaries to plan for, and compute, their own ROI.

Course Topics:

• Understanding the definitions of questioned costs, unsupported costs, disallowed costs, and funds put to better use
• New strategies for computing their return on investment for audits, inspections and evaluations
• “Other Impact” categories that can, and have been, monetized by federal OIGs in the past

IG-5: UnCivil Servant: Holding IG Employees Accountable for Performance and Conduct (1-2 days)

IG-6: The IG Supervisor’s Role in EEO (1/2-1 day)

For many federal IG supervisors, the EEO process is mysterious and foreboding. With this course, FELTG aims to make it less so. Federal supervisors have a role to play in the EEO process – and it’s an important one. FELTG’s experienced instructors describe that role in detail and provide specific guidance of how to handle each step along the way. Failure to understand the process will lead to costly mistakes, especially if the complaint reaches the EEOC. Attendees will leave this course with a thorough understanding of Equal Employment law basics.

Course Topics: The role of EEO in the federal government; defining protected categories: race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability and reprisal; what to do if you’re a Responding Management Official in a complaint; defending against frivolous complaints; EEO witness tips.

IG-7: Preventing and Correcting Sexual Harassment in the IG Workplace (1/2-1 day)

The #MeToo movement has had a noticeable influence on the workplace. There has been a noticeable increase in sexual harassment complaints, according to EEOC reports. Supervisors who attend this course will learn their responsibilities to respond to harassment claims, as well as how to effectively address situations before they rise to the level of harassment. Employees who attend this course will understand the rights and responsibilities employees have in preventing sexual harassment in the workplace.

Course Topics: Definition of sexual harassment; circumstances that constitute harassment; roles in harassment; tangible employment actions; hostile work environment harassment; same-sex harassment; strategies for prevention.

IG-8: Handling Behavioral Health Issues and Threats of Violence in the Federal Workplace (1-2 days)

These are the kind of workplace challenges that make you pause and, sometimes, doubt yourself. What should you do if someone threatens violence at your agency? How can you best prepare yourself to protect the lives of those around you? Are there risk factors that might give you an indication of when someone will become violent? What do you do when an employee with bipolar disorder is going through a manic phase? Our behavior health expert will provide you with real answers – once that require more understanding more than the law says. For federal managers, these topics are too important to ignore.

Course Topics: Your agency’s legal obligation to provide its employees with a safe workplace; ADAAA requirements on accommodating individuals with mental impairments and other behavioral health issues; types of mental disabilities and how they may exhibit in the workplace; the “direct threat” analysis; dealing with suicidal employees; dos and don’ts when working employees who have behavioral health issues; myths and facts about targeted violence in the workplace; individual characteristics that put an employee at higher risk of committing an act of violence; steps to take if someone becomes violent in the workplace; developing and implement an in-house threat management team to deal with threat assessments; risk management; the best ways to keep employees safe during a crisis.