Changes Made To Federal Audit Clearinghouse Search Function

Nonfederal entities that meet the $750,000 single audit threshold are required to have a single audit performed and must submit their audit reporting package to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, as per the Office of Management and Budget’s uniform grant guidance. While auditees may be aware of the submission requirements, they may not be as familiar with the site’s search function to find audit information at the Federal Audit Clearinghouse (FAC) Image Management System (IMS).

As background, the IMS allows the public to search the entire database using numerous queries. Among these include fiscal year, auditee employer identification number, auditee name, auditee state, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) number, federal cognizant/oversight agency, major program and other categories. Because the database is extremely large, users seeking information on audits should attempt to narrow their search parameters.

The Department of Commerce Census Bureau, which maintains the site, has notified that the site now contains the single audit packages for submissions with federal fiscal periods ending in 2019. Regular users of the IMS should be aware of a recent change: the FAC updated the labeling for what was previously known as the “FAC Accepted Date" on the Search Results page. “FAC Accepted Date” has been changed to “Initial Date Received,” however, the database name in the Summary Reports or Complete Database Downloads will remain FACACCEPTEDDATE. This is the date that auditees, auditors and others should use to determine whether an audit report was submitted on time. A second field has been added with the label “Date Accepted by FAC,” which will appear in the Summary Reports or Complete Database Downloads as DATERECEIVED. The clearinghouse states that this is the date that the most recent version of an audit report that was submitted to the FAC was accepted as a valid submission. Federal awarding agencies and pass-through entities, when issuing management decisions, should use “Date Accepted by FAC” as the “date of acceptance of the audit report by the FAC” (§200.521(d)).

All single audit reporting packages, with the possible exception of Indian tribes and tribal organizations, that are submitted under the uniform guidance are available on the IMS system per §200.512(b)(1). Indian tribes and tribal organizations may opt not to authorize the FAC to make the reporting package publicly available on IMS per §200.512(b)(2).

We encourage the grant community to conduct audit searches. They could prove informative for improving their own audit processes.

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