Sneak Preview: Treasury, DOI Urged To Respond To Audits of COVID-19 Funded Tribes
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.)
The Department of the Treasury will collaborate with the Department of the Interior (DOI) to share information about which tribal recipients receiving COVID-19 relief funding are required to submit single audit reports, and follow up with those tribes that did not submit timely single audits, if they filed them at all, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendation.
Treasury and DOI awarded about $32.7 billion in COVID-19 relief funds beginning in federal fiscal year (FY) 2020 to tribal entities, with Treasury providing $20 billion from the Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund Tribal Government Set-Aside and $8 billion from the Coronavirus Relief Fund Tribal Government Set-Aside. Tribal recipients that met the single audit threshold (which at the time was $750,000 in federal awards expended annually) were required to undergo a single audit (§200.501).
GAO found that while DOI appropriately designed procedures within its Single Audit Report Handbook to identify and track tribal recipients that did not submit required single audit reports or were not required to do so, Treasury did not maintain such procedures to identify all tribal recipients that met the single audit threshold. The agency did not have existing single audit processes when its COVID-19 programs were established, and it still is developing procedures to fully carry out its single audit responsibilities as a federal awarding agency. “Without [these procedures], Treasury has not been able to identify and follow up with all tribal entities that have late or missing single audit reports,” GAO notes.
For example, for FYs 2020-2022, DOI tracked the status of 1,478 (99%) of 1,488 single audit reports submitted by tribal recipients. In comparison, Treasury tracked the status of only 1,118 (60%) of 1,849 single audit reports due from tribal entities during these fiscal years. Treasury officials told GAO that it initially attempted to use recipient-reported expenditures data in its Treasury Recovery Awards Management System to identify tribal recipients that met the single audit threshold but had not submitted their single audit reports, but data limitations prevented it from effectively identifying late or missing single audit reports.
The GAO report also states that DOI and Treasury have policies and procedures for reviewing and following up on single audit findings, including issuing management decisions on tribal entities’ corrective action plans to address audit findings, related to the use of COVID-19 relief funds. DOI’s procedures for issuing management decisions appropriately call for such decisions within the required six-month period (§200.521(d)). However, Treasury did not issue management decisions within this six-month period, despite having policies and procedures requiring its staff to do so. After reviewing a sample of 30 identified, but unprepared, Treasury management decisions required in response to audits of tribal entities related to COVID-19 program-related findings for FY 2020-2022, GAO found that Treasury issued three management decisions after six months, and 27 had not been issued as of May 22, 2024.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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