Sneak Preview: NIH Looks To Better Resolve Audit Recommendations

(The following was excerpted from a recent article in the Single Audit Information Service.) The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently stated that its staff aims to place greater emphasis on reducing more than 200 unresolved audit recommendations, some from audits more than 10 years old, that were revealed in a recent report by the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG). The agency also explained that it will update its policies so that it will submit required audit resolution documentation to OIG on a timely basis.

None of the audits in the OIG review were subject to the current regulations under Subpart F of the uniform guidance and HHS regulations at 45 C.F.R. Part 75. The applicable guidance and regulations for the audits that OIG assessed for the report were former OMB Circulars A-133 and A-50, and former HHS regulations at 45 C.F.R. Part 74. These applied to audits of grant recipients meeting the single audit threshold that received awards in fiscal years on or prior to Dec. 26, 2014, and required NIH to resolve audit recommendations within six months of acceptance of a final audit report by the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

NIH’s audit resolution process involves issuing, within six months, a management decision to a grant recipient as to what corrective action is necessary, and submitting a clearance document to OIG providing the status of these reported audit recommendations. OIG prepares and forwards to NIH monthly stewardship reports that show the status of these reported audit recommendations. For the audit, OIG reviewed stewardship reports for FY 2015 and 2016, which included recommendations from audit reports ranging from December 2009 to April 2016, to determine whether the agency resolved audit recommendations in a timely manner, and to identify all unresolved audit recommendations that were due for resolution as of Sept. 30, 2016.

OIG found that NIH had resolved 262 of 487 audit recommendations that were outstanding for FYs 2015 and 2016. However, the agency did not resolve 166 of those 262 recommendations (63.4%) within the required six-month resolution period, with some finally being resolved more than three years later. In addition, NIH had not resolved 225 audits recommendations that were past due for resolution as of Sept. 30, 2016.

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