The Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended, provides ICE with broad authority to detain aliens believed to be removable while awaiting a determination of whether they should be removed from the United States as well as aliens ordered removed, and mandates that ICE detain certain categories of aliens. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 increased the number of aliens subject to mandatory detention, resulting in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service expanding the number of detention beds available to meet the mandate. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to further increase the number of detention beds by 8,000 annually starting in fiscal year 2006 and continuing through fiscal year 2010. Subsequently, the House Appropriations Committee began incorporating a mandate into the annual appropriations bill. The fiscal year 2014 appropriation act requires DHS to maintain 34,000 detention beds per day. Immigration custody is civil, not criminal, detention, and is not to be punitive; rather, ICE is to confine detainees for the administrative purpose of holding, processing, and preparing them for removal. According to ICE data, during fiscal year 2013, the agency housed an average of 32,805 detainees in its detention facilities each day and held detainees for an average of about 27 days.women from a wide variety of countries and with criminal and noncriminal ICE detainees include a mix of men and backgrounds. When detention facilities admit aliens, they are to use a classification system that separates detainees by threat risk and special vulnerabilities by assigning them a custody level of low, medium, or high. From fiscal years 2010 through 2013, about 44 percent of ICE detainees were of a low custody level, 41 percent were of a medium custody level, and 15 percent were of a high custody level. ERO oversees the confinement of ICE detainees in approximately 250 detention facilities that it manages in conjunction with private contractors or state or local governments, of which 166 were authorized to house detainees for over 72 hours, as of August 2013. Over 90 percent of the facilities are operated under agreements with state and local governments and house about half of ICE’s total detention population, together with, or separately from, other confined populations. The remaining facilities house exclusively ICE detainees and are operated by a mixture of private contractors and ICE, state, and local government employees. Table 1 presents information about the number and types of facilities that ICE uses to house detainees, the entities that own and operate them, and the percentage of the detainee population confined in each facility type. ICE’s detention facilities are located across the United States. In general, facilities that house the most detainees and exclusively ICE detainees are concentrated in the states along the southern United States border, while facilities that house fewer detainees are more evenly distributed across the nation. Figure 1 presents the locations of ICE’s over-72-hour facilities by size and type. The number of admissions to detention and related appropriations has more than doubled since 2005, as shown in figure 2. In fiscal year 2014, Congress provided about $2.8 billion for detention and removal operations, which include ICE’s maintenance of 34,000 detention beds, as required by law. ICE primarily uses three sets of national detention standards with varying requirements to govern the conditions of confinement in its detention facilities. ICE establishes the set of standards applicable to each detention facility through an individual contract or agreement with the facility. Accordingly, different facilities are governed by different standards. Table 2 provides information about each of these three sets of standards. ICE has two offices, OBPP and ERO Operations Support Division, that use different methods to collect and assess data on detention expenditures and costs for different purposes; however, these two methods do not provide ICE with complete data for managing detention costs across facilities and facility types. First, for the purposes of developing ICE’s annual budget requests for detention, ICE’s OBPP developed a method to estimate total detention costs per detainee per day. ICE refers to this as the bed-rate—or the total cost to house 1 detainee for 1 day. OBPP estimates this bed rate for budgetary purposes by conducting standardized, repeatable queries of ICE’s financial management system—the Federal Financial Management System. These standardized queries provide ICE with an average overall bed rate and the average bed rate for each of ICE’s 24 areas of responsibility.However, ICE officials stated that through fiscal year 2013 these queries did not produce data that can be used to track or manage costs for individual facilities or facility types because of errors in how ICE field office personnel enter data into ICE’s Federal Financial Management System and limitations in the system that make it difficult for ICE to accurately record expenditures for all individual facilities. Specifically, OBPP officials said that field office personnel manually enter financial codes for each expenditure to categorize and provide descriptive information about that expenditure—such as if it was for detention operations—which allows ICE to link expenditures to specific facilities, among other things. However, OBPP officials have found significant coding errors in these data fields for costs incurred through fiscal year 2013. For example, according to the officials, charges for 5 facilities operating under intergovernmental service agreements (IGSA) in five states were erroneously assigned to a SPC, because, according to ICE officials, the facilities were in different counties with the same name. In addition, while ICE could link expenditures to individual facilities of certain types—specifically SPCs, contract detention facilities (CDF), and facilities operating under a dedicated intergovernmental service agreement (DIGSA)—in its Federal Financial Management System in fiscal year 2013, it could not link expenditures to individual facilities operating under an IGSA because there were not codes in ICE’s Federal Financial Management System to link expenditures to IGSAs during fiscal year 2013. According to ICE officials, in fiscal year 2014, ICE introduced new financial coding processes. These processes are intended to address this limitation and allow costs to be linked to all types of facilities, including IGSA facilities; however, as ICE has recently begun to implement these new processes, it is too soon to determine the extent to which they will provide ICE with more reliable cost data across individual facilities and facility types. Second, for the purposes of tracking monthly costs at individual facilities, among other purposes, ICE ERO’s Operations Support Division—the budget office within ERO—developed a mechanism to manually track monthly costs by facility, called the Contract Financial Monitoring File, according to ICE ERO Operations Support Division officials. Specifically, the Operations Support Division developed the Contract Financial Monitoring File to monitor obligations and monthly expenditures related to the primary contract for each detention facility using information manually taken from facility invoices and contracts in addition to data in the Federal Financial Management System, according to ERO officials and Contract Financial Monitoring File guidance. The Operations Support Division developed this manual tool to work around the limitations in the Federal Financial Management System, which, in addition to those limitations discussed above, does not automatically interface with ICE’s invoice management system, according to ICE officials. Operations Support Division officials said they use the Contract Financial Monitoring File data to determine how much funding to allocate to each facility and to track expenditures and contract pricing at a single facility over time, among other uses. However, these data have limitations that preclude using the data to track and manage costs across individual facilities and facility types. For example, the Contract Financial Monitoring File data do not consistently or completely capture costs for facilities because some facility contracts include services such as medical care and transportation, while other contracts do not. For facilities with contracts that do not include such services, ICE or service providers contract with a third-party to provide these services. As a result, ICE officials said that some higher-cost facilities may therefore be providing services that are not provided by lower-cost facilities, or that are provided and billed by third parties. For example, ERO officials said that ICE provides medical care at most CDFs either through the ICE Health Service Corps or through a separate third-party contract with a health care provider, ICE’s medical costs paid instead of directly through the facility operator.for through headquarters—which, according to ICE officials totaled about $157.6 million in fiscal year 2013—are not reflected in facility invoice costs, and therefore are not included in the Contract Financial Monitoring File as costs to those individual facilities. Other facilities that directly provide these services would reflect these costs in facility invoices, and these costs would therefore be tracked separately in the Contract Financial Monitoring File. Further, some facilities provide transportation for detainees as part of the primary detention contract, and therefore the Operations Support Division captures these costs—which composed up to 47 percent of total facility expenditures in fiscal year 2013—for each facility in the Contract Financial Monitoring File. However, at other facilities, transportation services are not included in the facility contract. For these facilities, ICE provides transportation services for detainees through separate contracts with transportation providers, which ERO tracks separately, and does not link these costs to individual facilities in the Contract Financial Monitoring File. In addition, the file’s cost data do not include ICE overhead costs that vary across facilities. These costs include, among other things, shared utilities and telecommunication charges that occur in the field but are paid for through ICE service-wide contracts, according to an ICE official. As a result of these limitations, the Contract Financial Monitoring File data cannot be used for tracking and managing cost data across individual facilities and facility types. Since 2009, ICE has taken some steps to strengthen how it tracks and manages detention costs and expenditures. However, we identified limitations in ICE’s controls and processes in three areas. These limitations relate to (1) collecting and maintaining cost data, (2) ensuring cost is considered in placing aliens in detention facilities, and (3) preventing improper payments to detention facility operators. Collecting and maintaining cost data. ICE is in the process of planning to upgrade its new financial management system; however, ICE does not have a target time frame for when this upgrade will occur, according to ICE officials. The agency, however, has taken steps to manually track and manage costs, referred to as manual work-arounds.