blems with assigning inspectors, including turnover, work locations that do no match inspection needs, an unwillingness of inspectors to travel, and FAA’s inability to estimate the resources, needed to complete ATOS inspections.-To strengthen FAA’s inspection and enforcement processes, GAO recommends that the Secretary of Transportation direct the FAA Administrator to take several actions, including the following:-Revise FAA’s order to compliance and enforcement to specify that FAA’s inspection staff are required to report all observed problems and violations in their respective program office’s database for tracking the results of inspections.-Provide guidance to FAA’s inspection staff on how to distinguish major form minor violations and to legal staff on how to identify major legal cases.-Improve and integrate FAA’s inspection and enforcement databases to (1) identify major violations and major legal cases; (2) target inspection and legal resources to the violations and enforcement cases with the greatest potential impact on aviation safety and security; and (3) link inspection and enforcement data so that violations can be tracked from their identification through their resolution.-Nearly 96% of the inspections conducted by Flight Standards and Security in fiscal years 1990 through 1996 resulted in no findings of problems or violations. The rate of regulatory violations is probably higher than the reported rate because problems and violations are underreported. In addition, inspections do not detect all instances of noncompliance and test only a small fraction of the industry’s operations.-Security inspectors recorded no violations for 91% of their inspections. For Security, the percentage of inspections with violations varied more widely across the different types of entities inspected that for Flight Standards. Airport security inspections consistently generated the highest perce...
