Food Safety and Inspection Service needs to improve its methods

USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) needs to improve its methods for determining whether foreign countries exporting meat, poultry and egg products to the United States have equivalent food safety standards, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said in a new report. OIG found that exporting countries were not consistently audited in compliance with agency policy, and that policies and procedures did not contain sufficient guidance for conducting ongoing equivalence verification audits. FSIS officials did not follow policy when selecting countries for the audits, and did not consistently perform or document procedures when audits were performed, OIG said. FSIS did not have adequate policy to monitor, classify, evaluate or determine equivalence of individual sanitary measures. And FSIS did not obtain details identifying the date or reason why certified foreign establishments were removed from the program after they were deemed no longer eligible to export product to the United States, OIG found. FSIS did update its management control manual in response to prior audit recommendations, but these procedures were not incorporated into subsequent guidance issued in 2015, OIG said. The report is the third that OIG has issued on FSIS foreign equivalence assessments, the latest being 2008 where the focus was on the adequacy of the FSIS inspection processes. OIG staff this time around also traveled to witness FSIS verification audits in Northern Ireland and Denmark in addition to work conducted at the FSIS offices in Washington, D.C., the report said. FSIS generally agreed to take corrective actions based on OIG’s recommendations.