The Congress passed the Humane Slaughter Act in 1958 following intense and broad-based public concerns about cruelty and abuse of livestock in meat-packing plants. At that time, the Congress determined that using humane methods of slaughter prevented the needless suffering of livestock, resulted in safer and better working conditions for employees, and brought about improvements in products and economies of slaughter operations, among other benefits. However, the act was limited to federal government agencies, which were required to contract for or procure meat products only from producers and processors that employed humane slaughtering methods in all of their plants. In 1978, the Congress passed HMSA, which required that all federally inspected slaughter establishments adopt humane handling and slaughter methods. FSIS has issued regulations and directives to enforce the act. Important requirements of these regulations and guidance include the following: Animals stunned before slaughter must be rapidly and effectively rendered insensible before they are slaughtered. Stunning is effective when the animal feels no pain, is rendered instantly unconscious, and remains unconscious until slaughtered. Dragging of disabled and other animals unable to move while conscious is prohibited. All holding pens and driveways and ramps must be designed, built, and maintained to prevent injury to livestock. Livestock should be provided with access to water in holding pens, and food if held for more than 24 hours. The use of electrical prods and other devices to move livestock must not be excessive. FSIS is responsible for ensuring compliance with HMSA. FSIS is also responsible for ensuring the safety of most meat, poultry, and processed egg products at federally inspected facilities. Currently, FSIS employs in- plant about 7,800 inspectors—that is, public health veterinarians, food inspectors, and consumer safety inspectors. These inspectors work collaboratively, and are responsible for inspecting animals prior to slaughter, as well as the carcasses after slaughter, in order to ensure the food is safe for human consumption. According to FSIS officials, as inspectors carry out their food safety and other activities, they are responsible for monitoring compliance with humane handling and slaughter requirements at plants that are covered by HMSA. According to FSIS, while HMSA requires inspectors to observe the entire handling and slaughter process, inspectors do not have to observe all animals all the time for HMSA compliance. When inspectors observe a violation of HMSA or its implementing regulations, they are required to notify plant management and document the violation. In response to HMSA noncompliance, FSIS can take a number of enforcement actions, which impose restrictions on a facility’s ability to operate, including the following: For less serious violations of HMSA, inspectors at a facility can issue a “reject tag” to quickly respond to violations that are limited in scope. Inspectors place these reject tags on a piece of equipment or an area of the plant, prohibiting use until the violation is corrected. For more serious violations, the district manager can suspend inspection until violations are addressed. This usually results in suspended operations at the facility (or part of the facility) because without federal inspections the facility’s products are prevented from entering interstate and foreign commerce. In the rare cases where a plant fails to respond to FSIS concerns about repeated or serious violations, the administrator of FSIS can withdraw inspection. This removes the grant of inspection from a facility, preventing its products from entering interstate and foreign commerce. The facility must reapply for and be awarded a grant of inspection before federal inspections may resume. In 2004, we identified weaknesses in FSIS’s regulations and guidance for recording compliance with HMSA in key areas: (1) the frequency and scope of humane handling and slaughter violations, and (2) actions to enforce compliance with humane handling and slaughter provisions. FSIS has taken steps to improve its reporting of humane handling and slaughter violations. However, although the Congress has urged USDA to report annually on violations and trends in compliance, USDA has not issued such a report since March 2003. Such public reporting can enhance transparency. In 2004, we reported that incomplete and inconsistent FSIS inspection records made it difficult to determine the frequency and scope of humane handling and slaughter violations. Available FSIS records showed that during the 28 months between January 2001 and March 2003, inspectors wrote 553 noncompliance records to document violations of HMSA and the implementing regulations at 272 facilities across the United States. According to these inspection records, ineffective stunning, which does not quickly render animals insensible to pain, and in many cases results in a conscious animal reaching slaughter, was the most prevalent type of noncompliance. To a lesser extent, the records showed incidents of, in declining order of prevalence: poor facility conditions, failure to provide water to animals awaiting slaughter, excessive force, and excessive use of electric prods. However, in conducting this analysis, we found internal control problems that call into question the reliability of FSIS records regarding compliance with the act. First, because the agency had not stored its noncompliance records in electronic form, it could not provide us with at least 44 of the 553 records from January 2001 through March 2003. Second, almost half of the DVMSs we interviewed at the time of our review reported that inspectors did not always document noncompliance when they should have because they were unsure about regulatory requirements. Third, the noncompliance records did not consistently document the scope and severity of violations. For example, some noncompliance records mentioned that ineffective stunning occurred, but did not provide the cause of the violation or the number of animals affected. We also reported FSIS took inconsistent enforcement actions to address noncompliance with HMSA. Inspectors stationed in slaughter plants had not consistently issued reject tags, which temporarily halt operations in all or part of a plant. Several of the DVMSs we interviewed attributed the inconsistent enforcement actions to inspectors’ inexperience, lack of clarity regarding their authority, or the misperception that certain violations were minor. We found similar inconsistencies at the district management level. District managers can decide to take the more serious enforcement action of withdrawing inspectors from the plant, most likely suspending a plant’s operations, when they are notified of serious violations. However, they lacked clear criteria on when to do so, which can lead to inconsistent enforcement. We found, for example, one case in which a district manager did not suspend inspections after inspectors had issued 16 noncompliance records to a slaughter facility documenting the plant’s failure to properly stun animals. In contrast, another facility’s failure to provide access to water and to maintain acceptable pen conditions led to a suspension of operations. As a result, FSIS could not ensure that humane slaughter requirements are consistently enforced across districts, a fact that undermines FSIS efforts to enforce the act. To provide more useful information and to help strengthen oversight of HMSA, we recommended in 2004 that the Secretary of Agriculture direct FSIS to (1) include in noncompliance records specific information on the type and cause of violations, (2) establish additional criteria for when districts are to take enforcement actions in cases of repetitive violations, and (3) require that district offices and inspectors clearly document the basis for enforcement actions that they take in response to repetitive violations, among others. In response to these recommendations FSIS took steps intended to strengthen its oversight of humane handling and slaughter methods at federally inspected facilities. In particular, it has issued additional guidance to its district offices and inspectors to assist them in determining when to take enforcement actions for repeated violations. The guidance includes, among other things: categories for the types and causes of humane handling and slaughter violations to be reported on noncompliance records; questions inspection personnel should use to assist them in determining when a noncompliance trend exists; and examples of noncompliance activities affecting an animal’s safety or constituting inhumane treatment of an egregious nature that would warrant immediate enforcement by inspection personnel. Although the agency’s actions were responsive to our recommendations, without further evaluation, we do not know the effectiveness of these actions. Finally, FSIS has not reported annually on trends in compliance with humane slaughter methods, as urged by the Congress, and its most recent data on violations were incomplete. Public reporting is the means through which the federal government communicates the results of its work to the Congress and the American people. Such reporting is in the public interest and promotes transparency in government operations. In 2002, the Congress urged the Secretary of Agriculture to fully enforce the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and report annually to the Congress on the number of violations and trends recorded by FSIS inspectors. According to FSIS officials, in response to the Congress and as part of its annual appropriations process, USDA has provided the House and Senate appropriations committees information on the number of suspensions as well as general information on HMSA activities. However, in recent years, USDA has not reported to the Congress on the number of violations and trends recorded by its inspectors. In its most recent report, in March 2003, USDA indicated to the Congress that during fiscal year 2002, “very few infractions were for actual inhumane treatment of the animals.” However, we identified shortcomings in the data used to make this finding. At the time of our review, officials told us that the statement was based on a sample of approximately half of the noncompliance records available. In contrast, our analysis of all of the noncompliance records FSIS provided for fiscal year 2002 showed that one-fourth of the 366 noncompliance incidents documented by inspectors were for incidents of ineffective stunning which fails to meet humane standards in USDA regulations. Lack of complete and consistent data can make it difficult for FSIS to accurately assess compliance with the act, and prevents transparency in the reporting of violations. Unlike the budgets of other federal agencies responsible for food safety, the budget for FSIS has seen a marked increase since 1988.