Could the new federal grant regulations make your life easier?
Believe it or not, that is one of the three main objectives of the combining 8 grant management regulations into one “super-circular.”
Feel better now?
(If you aren’t familiar with this massive change, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the new Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards at the tail-end of 2013.)
3 Purposes of the New Grant Regulations
Here are the three primary purposes of the new rules:
• Improve Performance
• Strengthen Oversight
• Reduce Administrative Burden
OK.
That’s all sounds good, but what does it really mean?
How will performance improve?
The discussions around creating program measurements and key performance indicators are nothing new, but this trend is now solidly entrenched in the new federal grant regulations.
For instance:
Focus on outcomes
• Shift agency and grantee emphasis to outcome-based assessments vs. regulatory compliance
• Allocate an increased share of grant funds to organizations and program models with strong track records of effectively using of taxpayer dollars
Allow innovative approaches
• Individual federal agencies will have the authority to waive some requirements (instead of that solely being an OMB function)
• Build greater review of effectiveness into the evaluation process so agencies can learn what works in the real world.
How will oversight be strengthened?
Included in the new requirements is a shift to check earlier in the grant management process instead of after the funds have all been spent.
Look before you leap
• New regulations will require federal agencies and pass-through entities to perform a risk review of a potential grantee or subgrantee prior to making the award.
• Provide stronger ways to deal with non-compliance
Good Internal Controls: No longer a “nice to have”
• Internal controls move from a “mention” to an administrative “requirement” to strengthen controls sooner in the grant management cycle
Refocus on reducing and resolving audit findings
• In a move that seems counter-intuitive to greater oversight, the Single Audit threshold has been raised to $750,000 in federal awards.
• At the same time, federal agencies will expand their use of audit resolution methods to reduce repeated audit findings.
How will our lives improve?
Does it seem possible?
Could the administrative burden of all these federal regulations really be reduced?
While it may feel like a dream at this point that is the goal.
Here are some examples:
Reduce the number of regulations to comply with.
• One-stop-shopping with a “super circular” instead of eight individual circulars
• Provide clearer identification of when guidance is uniform across all entity types, or different depending on your organizational type.
Reduce findings from unclear guidance vs. non-compliance
• In a MyFedTrainer study we found that nearly one in three organizations had some type of audit finding. Yikes!
• In making the grant management regulations clearer, the hope is that less confusion will translate into less waste, fraud and abuse of grant funds.
Get Ready for More Changes
Are you feeling a little overwhelmed?
Don’t worry.
In our next article, we’ll dig deeper into the major policy changes and what they mean to grant managers.
Ready to Improve Your Grant Management?
How about you?
Would you like to be a better grant manager?
We have another grant management training seminar coming soon.
Click here to get all the details!
Hope to see you there!
Author:
Lucy Morgan CPA, MBA
CEO, Compliance Warrior
Author of “Decoding Grant Management-The Ultimate Success Guide to the Federal Grant Regulations in 2 CFR Part 200” The 2nd Edition is now available on Amazon in Paperback and Kindle versions.
