Technology Needed To Combine Federal Audits With Risk Management
The government is seeking assistance from the grants community yet again, and this time, it’s more technical in nature. Under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum M-18-24, Strategies to Reduce Grant Recipient Reporting Burden, OMB seeks to work with federal agencies to adopt new or modify existing grant systems that incorporate data standards, moving toward common solutions to support the award, monitoring, auditing, reporting and other grantmaking business processes. Further, OMB has directed federal agencies to use governmentwide data standards and work collaboratively with other grantmaking agencies to find innovative solutions that ease recipient burden, reduce the existing number of legacy grant systems and adopt shared solutions that meet the needs of awarding agencies and recipients.
To that end, the Government Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy is soliciting ideas on and demonstrations of a combined single audit and risk management solution. Such a shared solution would manage the single audit process; integrate and analyze audit information with award performance, financial and compliance information; and improve risk analysis to inform decisionmaking across the grant award and monitoring process. This would enable the federal government to develop a single risk assessment tool, and perhaps lead to less burdensome terms and conditions of awards for “lower risk” recipients.
On the main solicitation page, GSA's overall announcement discusses the scope of the project. For example, the solution would store and integrate audit results, findings and corrective actions from single audits and Office of Inspector General audits, while future iterations may store risk-related information from Government Accountability Office audits. It would also store and integrate management decision letters and other audit resolution-related information and enable shared access to audit resolution-related information among all agencies making awards to a given nonfederal entity.
Interested parties are invited to participate in a Virtual Pre-Demonstration Conference on Jan. 8, 2019. They must register here. Then, GSA will host Industry Demonstration Days Jan. 29-31 in Washington, D.C., as an opportunity for vendors to present an explanation and demonstration of their software solution that could meet the needs of the single audit and risk management community. To register, sign up here by 6 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 17, 2019.
This bodes to be a huge opportunity for the technical community, as well as for grant and audit folks. We look forward to seeing what comes from this effort.
