Sneak Preview: HHS, OMB To Assess Best Practices When Revising Grant Data Standards
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to partner with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to evaluate leading practices for the development of clear, concise data definitions as it considers future developments in updating the current Grants Management Data Standards Version 2.0 data elements, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendation.
OMB in November 2019 issued Version 1.0 of the grants management standard data elements, which included more than 400 common grants management terms and definitions, both pre-award and post-award. In June 2021, OMB released Version 2.0 of the standard data elements, further refining them and including updates to align with definition changes made in Subpart A of the August 2020 revised uniform guidance (e.g., changing “competitive” to “discretionary”), while updating some authoritative and business capability references. These 540 grant data elements are available at https://ussm.gsa.gov/fibf-gm/.
Developing the data standards for information submitted by grant and cooperative agreement recipients was one of the goals established under the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act (Pub. L. 116-103), which established timelines under federal law for achieving specific data-related milestones. The GREAT Act codified efforts on the federal level to encourage the development of uniform data standards to improve federal business processes.
The law required OMB and HHS to establish by Dec. 30, 2021, governmentwide data standards for recipient-reported information under federal awards. It also required OMB and HHS, by Dec. 30, 2020, to publish and submit a report to Congress explaining the reasoning for the determination of whether to use nonproprietary entity identifiers, and by Dec. 30, 2022, to issue guidance to grantmaking agencies on how to implement the new data standards in existing reporting practices and federal audits. It also required OMB and HHS to enable the collection, public display and maintenance of federal award information as a governmentwide data set by Dec. 30, 2024 (see ¶473 of the Federal Grants Management Module).
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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