Engagement Memo—Audit of procurement and vendor payment practices

We are initiating an audit of Amtrak’s (the company’s) procurement and vendor payment practices. This audit is following up on our previous work in this area—Governance: Opportunities Exist to Improve the Efficiency of Procurement Practices for Goods and Services (OIG‐A‐2015‐005). Our objective is to assess the extent to which the company has improved its practices to procure goods more economically and pay vendors more efficiently—the opportunities we identified in our previous report. We may expand our scope or modify our objective during the audit.

Our work will include, but not be limited to, interviewing company officials, as well as reviewing available documentation and data related to the purchases of goods and the payments to company vendors. We will make our requests for documents as our audit progresses. We also will work to minimize the impact of the audit by coordinating interviews and observations with staff in advance.