Essentially, the idea behind systemic investigations is to take a much more strategic approach to them and make sure that we follow up on the recommendations. One of the issues that occurred before is that we would make recommendations and really not have the resources on a yearly basis to go back to ensure that the recommendations had been implemented. The strategic approach to systemic issues now is to basically look at the trends we can identify from our complaints, extract those trends, and then target them through systemic investigations, which are more widespread than just being based on a single case.
This puts us in a position to make much more widespread recommendations to the various institutions or to central agencies, as we did in the special report. It also allows us to follow up on these recommendations and to do formal systemic investigations on a recurring basis to target broad-based serious and systemic issues.
They are very resource-intensive, because they apply to several federal institutions.