Potential Changes to Grants Policy

Today, we were proud to hold one of our newest conferences — the VSCPA State and Local Government Day in Richmond. Designed for CPAs who work in state and local government, the conference brought together a very important segment of our CPA community.

One of today's important speakers was Terrill W. Ramsey, CPA, CIA, of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who spoke on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) recent proposal of reforms to grants policy for cost principles, administrative requirements and single audits. The OMB issued this proposal late last month and seeks feedback on various ideas for change to compliance audits of federal funds, commonly referred to as single audits or Circular A-133 audits. There is only a 30-day comment period provided, so comments are due March 29.

Among the ideas discussed were a potential increase in the threshold for audit (from $500,000 to $1 million) and a new category of single audit that will be narrower in scope than what is in place today (between $1 million and $3 million). Entities expending more than $3 million would continue to have a full single audit.

The AICPA’s Governmental Audit Quality Center (GAQC) developed an alert on this issue, which can be accessed by the public on the GAQC website.