COFFA Celebrates Its First Anniversary Touting Accomplishments
With much ballyhoo, the Council on Federal Financial Assistance (COFFA) — rhymes with “sofa” — on Tuesday held an event — even allowing the public to watch via webinar — celebrating the end of its first year touting some of the work that the council has been working on over the last 12 months and inviting stakeholder organizations to attend to field questions.
For those relatively unfamiliar with the COFFA, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established the council on Aug. 9, 2023, under OMB Memorandum M-23-19. COFFA aims to serve as a federal interagency forum to improve coordination, transparency and accountability for the award and management of federal financial assistance. It is comprised of the 24 federal agencies identified in the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-576), and a representative from the Small Agency Council. Each COFFA agency’s deputy secretary will designate a senior financial assistance officer (SFAO) to serve as a representative to the council. COFFA will be responsible for providing strategic direction, policy recommendations, and priority-setting for other governmentwide grant-related activities (e.g., Financial Assistance Committee for E-Government, Grants Management Quality Service Management Office (QSMO)).
Among the work that the COFFA has been doing over this past year includes implementing the 2024 revisions to the uniform guidance along with related implementation materials, working to simplify federal agency notices of funding opportunities, establishing and improving the Federal Program Inventory and updating grant-related data standards to make back-end systems more uniform.
During Tuesday’s one-year anniversary of the COFFA, OMB Deputy Controller Deidre Harrison said that COFFA members from the federal agencies assist OMB in understanding the implications that certain governmentwide grant-related policies may mean for their own oversight efforts and for their recipients. “From day one with our first meeting, no one [within the council] was shy to make a comment about something that wasn’t working and to immediately follow it up and volunteer their own time to fix it, not for themselves but for the government,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been able to get any of the work done that we got accomplished over the last year if it wasn’t for the” SFAOs participating in the COFFA.
When asked by representatives from stakeholder organizations how COFFA will engage with the recipient community over the course of the next year to ensure effective and consistent implementation of the uniform guidance, Harrison stressed the importance of “continuing to listen” to grantee concerns. “In the coming weeks and months, we want to invite [recipients] to our community meetings to tell us their experiences,” she explained. “We want to hold listening sessions for recipients receiving funds from multiple agencies to tell us what is working or not working. We will hold our first listening session in the next few weeks, and we want to hear from you; we can’t fix it if we don’t know it’s broken.”
Federal agencies working together to reduce the burden for financial assistance recipients is always better than the agencies working in silos. Congratulations COFFA on your first year, and we look forward to the work you do going forward.
Join us for our following Thompson Grants event:
Federal Grants Forum: Navigating the 2024 Uniform Guidance Changes | Oct. 29-30, 2024 | Virtual Event
Thompson Grants Workshop: Subrecipient Monitoring |Nov. 13, 2024 | Virtual Event
