DOJ awards federal financial assistance to state and local governments, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, tribal jurisdictions, and educational institutions, to help prevent crime, assist victims of crime, and promote innovative law enforcement efforts. Federal financial assistance programs provide funding pursuant to statutory authorization and annual appropriations through formula grants, discretionary grants, cooperative agreements, and other payment programs, but are all generally referred to as grants. From fiscal year 2005 through fiscal year 2012, approximately $33 billion has been appropriated to support the more than 200 grants programs that DOJ manages. DOJ administers its grant programs through three granting agencies—the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), and the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office. OJP is the largest of DOJ’s granting agencies, and its mission to develop the nation’s capacity to prevent and control crime, administer justice, and assist crime victims is broader than that of OVW or the COPS Office. OJP’s bureaus and offices administer grant programs that address victim assistance, technology and forensics, and juvenile justice, among other things. One such grant program is the BVP program, which was created following enactment of the Bulletproof Vest Partnership Grant Act of 1998, and provides grants on a competitive basis to state and local law enforcement agencies to assist in their purchasing of ballistic-resistant and stab-resistant body armor. The COPS Office grant programs focus on advancing community policing, which generally involves cooperation between police departments and community residents in identifying and developing solutions to crime problems. OVW administers grant programs related to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. DOJ and Treasury both operate asset forfeiture programs that are designed to prevent and reduce crime through the seizure and forfeiture of assets that represent the proceeds of, or were used to facilitate, federal crimes. Each department also maintains a separate fund that is the receipt account for the deposit of forfeitures. Over the years, a series of laws has been enacted that has expanded forfeiture from drug offenses to money laundering, financial crimes, and terrorism-related offenses. In addition to depriving criminals of property used or acquired through illegal activities, these programs are designed to enhance cooperation among foreign, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies through the equitable sharing of assets recovered through the program, and, as a by- product, produce revenues in support of future law enforcement investigations and related forfeiture activities. A number of federal law enforcement organizations participate in DOJ’s Assets Forfeiture Fund (AFF), including the U.S. Marshals Service, which serves as the primary custodian of seized and forfeited property for the program. Once property is forfeited to the government, it is subsequently sold, put into official use, destroyed, or transferred to another agency. Cash and monetary instruments that have been forfeited and property that has been forfeited and sold are subsequently deposited in the forfeiture fund. In fiscal year 2012, the value of total assets in the AFF was approximately $5.97 billion. Money collected in the funds is used to pay for expenses related to the asset forfeiture program and for other law enforcement initiatives. DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) operate or support, through grant funding or personnel, five types of field-based information-sharing entities that may collect, process, analyze, or disseminate information in support of law enforcement and counterterrorism-related efforts, as shown in table 1. In general, the five types of entities in our review were established under different authorities and have distinct missions, roles, and responsibilities. As of January 2013 there were a total of 268 of these field-based entities located throughout the United States, and DOJ, DHS, and ONDCP provided an estimated $129 million in fiscal year 2011 to support three of the five types of entities. In July 2012, we reported that DOJ’s more than 200 grant programs overlapped across 10 key justice areas, and that this overlap contributed to the risk of unnecessarily duplicative grant awards for the same or similar purposes. We also recognized that overlapping grant programs across programmatic areas result in part from authorizing statutes. Further, we recognized that overlap among DOJ’s grant programs may be desirable because such overlap can enable DOJ’s granting agencies to leverage multiple funding streams to serve a single justice purpose. However, we found that the existence of overlapping grant programs is an indication that agencies should increase their ability to monitor where their funds are going and coordinate to ensure that any resulting duplication in grant award funding is purposeful rather than unnecessary, and we made recommendations to reflect these needed improvements. In addition, we found that OJP, OVW, and the COPS Office did not routinely share lists of current and potential awardees to consider both the current and planned dispersion and purposes of all DOJ grant funding before finalizing new award decisions. Our work found instances where DOJ made multiple grant awards to applicants for the same or similar purposes without being aware of the potential for unnecessary duplication or whether funding from multiple streams was warranted. We also reported that OJP, OVW, and the COPS Office had not established policies and procedures requiring consistent coordination and information sharing among its granting agencies. Further, we found that OJP and OVW used a separate grants management system than the COPS Office, limiting their ability to share information on the funding they have awarded or are preparing to award to a recipient. officials, its mission and grant management processes are different enough to necessitate a separate system. However, OJP officials told us that its system has been and can be modified with minimal investment to accommodate different grant processes. We included some of these related findings in GAO, 2012 Annual Report: Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, Overlap, and Fragmentation, Achieve Savings, and Enhance Revenue, GAO-12-342SP (Washington, D.C.: Feb. 28, 2012). concurred with all eight of our recommendations. Five of the recommendations specifically relate to ways in which DOJ can improve program efficiency and resource management, and these are that DOJ conduct an assessment to better understand the extent to which the department’s grant programs overlap with one another and determine if grant programs may be consolidated; coordinate within and among granting agencies on a consistent basis to review potential or recent grant awards from grant programs that DOJ identifies as overlapping, before awarding grants; require its grant applicants to report all federal grant funding, including all DOJ funding, that they are currently receiving or have recently applied for in their grant applications; provide appropriate OJP, COPS Office, and OVW staff access to both grant management systems; and ensure its comprehensive study of DOJ grant management systems assesses the feasibility, costs, and benefits of moving to a single grants management system, including the steps needed to harmonize DOJ grant processes, so that any variation in how granting agencies manage their portfolios is not an encumbrance to potential system unification. DOJ has taken steps to partially address these recommendations. Specifically, DOJ has formed an assessment team, composed of OJP, OVW, and COPS Office representatives, to review all of the department’s fiscal year 2012 grant program solicitations, or announcements, and categorize them by several elements. These elements include program type, eligible grant funding recipients (e.g., states, localities, tribes, and law enforcement agencies), target grant award beneficiaries (e.g., victims and juveniles), allowable uses of the funds, and locations funded. The assessment team is also developing criteria to identify potentially duplicative programs and then plans to assign risk levels of potential duplication to those that have multiple solicitations addressing similar key components. According to DOJ officials, the assessment team plans to conclude its work later in 2013. In addition, OJP has granted read-only access of its grants management system to OVW and the COPS Office to allow pertinent staff in those offices to access the most up-to-date OJP grant information. Further, OJP officials said that they are exploring ways in which more data systems may be used for coordinating grants. DOJ officials anticipate that eventually, agencies can leverage the information in these systems during the preaward process to avoid funding potentially overlapping and duplicative grant activities; however, DOJ’s plans rest upon completion of the assessment team’s work. Officials told us that upon receipt of the assessment team’s findings, they plan to work to develop and support a targeted and strategic approach to reviewing applications across all three granting agencies before making grant award decisions. DOJ officials noted that as part of this approach, DOJ plans to establish policies and procedures to govern coordination efforts. Thus, completion of this assessment could better position DOJ to take more systemic actions— such as improved coordination and potential consolidation of its programs—to limit overlap and mitigate the risk of unnecessary duplication. DOJ has also initiated a feasibility study of moving to a single grants management system that includes the identification of the steps needed to harmonize grant processes, among other factors such as return on investment. Since this study—like DOJ’s other efforts to address all of our recommendations—is still under way, it is too soon to tell whether the department’s actions will fully address each of the recommendations. We have also previously reported on and made recommendations related to DOJ’s BVP grant program. In February 2012, we reported that DOJ had designed several controls for the BVP program to ensure grantee compliance with program requirements, among other things, but could take additional action to further reduce management risk. For example, we found that from fiscal years 2002 to 2009, the BVP program had awarded about $27 million in BVP grants to grant recipients who did not ultimately seek reimbursement.