A government watchdog investigation revealed the Justice Department lost track of dozens of foreign nationals who were brought to the U.S. and allowed to stay in the country to assist law enforcement.

The audit conducted by the DOJ’s inspector general, which spanned the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of Trump’s presidency, found that 62 of these foreign nationals had “absconded from DOJ control” and hundreds more weren’t being monitored properly.

DOJ sponsors the immigration of thousands of foreign nationals who might otherwise be inadmissible to the U.S. “due to their association with criminal enterprises.”

The new report, which scrutinized these DOJ immigration sponsorship programs, said these foreign nationals are useful to law enforcement because of “their access to criminal enterprises and ability to provide testimony in support of prosecution.” But there are “significant risks” involved as well, the report said, because the people in question “may be associated with criminal activity and motivated by the ability to reside temporarily in the United States.”

In addition to losing track of 62 foreign nationals, the audit also uncovered 18 instances where DOJ either didn’t renew or terminate their sponsorship of a foreign national properly “and therefore let the foreign nationals fall into an illegal status while residing in the United States.” The report said mistakes like that could result in “unnecessary, unexpected, and costly deportation of foreign nationals for whom DOJ had a continued need” and that the screw-ups could have “serious consequences for the investigations they were assisting.”

The Justice Department is supposed to work closely with the Department of Homeland Security in these sponsorship efforts, but the report described the DOJ’s faulty reporting mechanisms and poor communication with the DHS on this issue. The DOJ reported sponsoring 5,496 foreign nationals between fiscal 2015 and 2017, but the inspector general “identified over 1,000 DOJ-sponsored foreign nationals for whom DHS did not have current information” as of February 2018. According to the report, “DHS was still seeking information regarding 665 sponsorships” in August.

The two most common tools the DOJ uses in its sponsorship are the significant public benefit parole and deferred action. That type of parole permits a foreign national to enter the U.S. and stay on temporarily while being sponsored by law enforcement, while deferred action delays the deportation of a foreign national who isn’t in the U.S. legally. Two other types of sponsorship are S Visas, which allow foreign nationals to reside in the U.S. for three years while they cooperate with authorities on complex cases, and PL-110 sponsorship, which gives permanent legal residency to foreign nationals assisting in matters of national security overseas. Both of these are relatively rare.

The Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, which sponsored 2,380 foreign nationals and 3,059 foreign nationals during this time frame, respectively, are the DOJ agencies most heavily involved in the programs working with foreign nationals.

The DEA used parole 1,331 times and deferred action 1,033 times during this period, while the FBI used SPBPs 1,552 times and deferred action 1,433 times. The report said that “both ATF and FBI had policies that require the sponsoring special agent to immediately notify headquarters when a foreign national absconds” but that “there were no redundant methods to ensure that an absconsion is addressed immediately.”

“DOJ components must be vigilant in exercising their responsibilities for overseeing sponsored foreign nationals to fulfill their obligations to DHS, to protect the public, and to achieve their objectives of furthering investigations and prosecutions,” the inspector general report declared. “Therefore, effective oversight of these programs is essential.”

DOJ spokesman Alexei Woltornist told the Washington Examiner that “the Department of Justice is aware of the findings of the IG report and is working on remedying the problem.”

This isn’t the first time that problems like this have been uncovered inside the DOJ. A separate Justice Department inspector general investigation into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives back in March 2017 revealed that the ATF “could not provide an accurate total number of ATF-sponsored foreign national informants.”

