The Government Accountability Office released a report today criticizing the Department of Energy's efforts to track and review applications under its controversial loan guarantee program for clean energy projects.

The report says DOE continues to experience significant problems on the front end of the loan guarantee program at the heart of the political storm over Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that went bankrupt after receiving a half-billion dollars of taxpayer funding.

While DOE has closed 30 loan guarantees under the Section 1705 program -- which was backed by stimulus funding and requires clean energy projects to break ground by Sept. 30 this year -- no loan guarantees have yet been closed under the Section 1703 program. That program has been around longer and also funds clean energy projects, albeit under less favorable loan terms.

"To date, DOE has committed to six loan guarantees under section 1703 of the program, but it has not closed any section 1703 loan guarantees or otherwise demonstrated that the program is fully functional," the report says. "Many of the section 1703 applications have been in process since 2008 or before."

The report won't make Energy Secretary Steven Chu's appearance tomorrow before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee any easier. Chu is scheduled to testify about a recent White House-commissioned report that offers recommendations for improving DOE efforts to monitor loan guarantees and ensure that other companies getting loans don't meet Solyndra's fate.

DOE has said it's moving forward with the 1703 effort, and the Obama administration has promised that the failure of one project wouldn't derail its commitment to backing clean energy projects.

But GAO found the department lacks a consolidated system for documenting and tracking progress on reviewing new and ongoing loan guarantee applications.

DOE argues in its response that it has a "robust" records management system and that it began implementing a new records management system in 2011 to help track loan applications.

But in its report today, GAO notes that it took DOE some three months to manually gather information to answer a basic request for the identity of loan guarantee applicants, the applicants' current status and specific dates of review milestones.

"The fact that it took [the loan program office] 3 months to aggregate data on the status of applications for us suggests that its managers have not had readily accessible and up-to-date information and have not been doing such analysis on an ongoing basis," GAO writes.

GAO also found DOE doesn't always follow its own established criteria for assessing and approving loan guarantee applications.

GAO reviewed 13 applications and found that on 11, DOE diverged from its 43-step review process at least once and committed scores of documentation mistakes along the way.

Auditors acknowledged that while it is too early to put a price tag on those lapses, "omitting or poorly documenting review steps may pose increased financial risk to the taxpayer and result in inconsistent treatment of applicants."

Today's report is the sixth GAO review of the program that has become a major political headache for the Obama administration since the bankruptcy of the Solyndra.

The ongoing series of reviews is being conducted for the House and Senate appropriations committees, but Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Energy and Natural Resources ranking member Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), said he expects the issues raised by the report will be part of tomorrow's hearing.

Murkowski supports the loan program but has long been expressing concern about how DOE vets applicants and ensures that the program does not waste taxpayer dollars.

"It become quite clear DOE wasn't set up to handle all the money it was given" for the loan guarantee program effort, Dillon said. "You've got to learn from your mistakes. We can't afford to repeat them."