hurricanes,  both NEMIS and its support staff were stressed to the limit and 

that Herculean efforts were required to meet demands that exceeded several 

design requirements by an order of magnitude.   The tremendous effort 

required to meet the 2004 challenges logically evokes questions about the 

ability of FEMA's IT systems to prevail in supporting future disasters.  

Indeed, senior officials and a lead engineer for one of FEMA's primary 

systems repeatedly shared with us concerns about the system's ability to 

withstand potential multiple or catastrophic events.   

Fourth, given the IT issues expressed above, we believe that the EP&R CIO is 

not justified in referring to EP&R's  highly performing, well managed and 

staffed IT systems  and that our overall message that IT could be better 

managed is warranted.  Though the EP&R CIO suggested in his comments 

that a review with him,  may clear up some of the obvious inaccuracies,  it 

should be pointed out that we maintained ongoing communications with the 

EP&R CIO's office during the course of our audit.  For example, as requested, 

we met on a monthly basis with the EP&R CIO, or representative staff when 

the EP&R CIO was unavailable, to discuss audit progress, IT issues, and 

potential findings.  In addition, as discussed previously, we held an audit exit 

meeting with the EP&R CIO and key IT officials, providing, as a courtesy, the 

opportunity to submit informal comments on a preliminary draft of our report, 

which served as input to the draft subsequently distributed for formal written 

comments. 

The EP&R CIO neither concurred nor non concurred with our 

recommendations, but instead provided additional detailed comments and 

information to update or supplement issues we outline in our report.  The 

following discussion provides our evaluation of each of the EP&R CIO's 

additional comments. 

FEMA's Support for DHS Strategic Goals:  The EP&R CIO provided a 

number of comments on our treatment of FEMA strategic planning issues, and 

these are discussed below: 

We disagree with the EP&R CIO's statement that our conclusion that 

 FEMA does not support DHS' strategic goals  is based on what the CIO 

calls a  misunderstanding of the relationship between FEMA's plans and 

metrics, and those of DHS.   Our audit did not seek to analyze 

comprehensively FEMA's strategic planning processes.  Rather, our 

objective was to review EP&R's approach for responding to and 

recovering from incidents.  In this context, we examined the strategic and 

IT plans in place to determine whether they are appropriately linked to 

Emergency Preparedness and Response Could Better Integrate Information Technology  

with Incident Response and Recovery 

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