Three auditors from the Inspector General's Office of the US Department of Homeland Security are in American Samoa to assess the delivery of federal assistance to residents following the tsunami disaster.
The Regional Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Nancy Ward, says it's routine for this to be done a federal disaster has been declared.
She says they look to see how organisations such as FEMA are going about their work.
"It's their typical process to come out into the disaster area to look and see how debris monitoring is going, how mission taskings and mission assignments have been processed in the immediate aftermath of the event, to understand how the money is flowing, to understand how our programmes are being implemented."
The Regional Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Nancy Ward.
