The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) office of inspector general has issued a report saying the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA) has experienced improvements after it modernized the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) system but still needs to address data quality issues in its new NFIP platform.
DHS OIG said in a Nov. 2nd report the transition to the new PIVOT system has helped FIMA speed up processing of policies and claims transactions, improve policyholder address validation and enhance reporting capabilities.
However, data reliability issues continue to exist. To address these issues, the inspector general recommended that the deputy associate administrator for insurance and mitigation develop a strategy to improve data quality in the PIVOT system by making vendors accountable for rectifying transaction errors.
FIMA should also integrate a data quality evaluation into its PIVOT operational reviews and come up with a strategy to inform stakeholders of the data issues in the historical NFIP data and publish warnings with regard to the use of those data.
The report said FEMA concurred with all those recommendations.
