(The following was excerpted from a recent article in the Single Audit Information Service.) In response to a recent Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury (TCT) audit, the child care program director for the Tennessee Department of Education (TDE) plans to meet more regularly with evaluators of school-age child care sites to ensure that inspections are thorough and that these facilities are properly monitored.

The grants community is becoming aware of the importance of having internal controls, and using the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission’s (COSO) internal control model to ensure that their grant programs aren’t targets of fraud, waste and abuse is a useful tool. The COSO model was even mentioned in §200.303 in the Office of Management and Budget’s uniform grant guidance as a key reference for internal controls. Now the COSO model, otherwise known as the Internal Control-Integrated Framework, has potential in another arena — cyberspace.

(The following was excerpted from an article in the Federal Grants Management Handbook.) A key goal under the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) uniform grant guidance is to improve program performance to achieve better outcomes; however, program consolidation is also on the horizon. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) contends that OMB can do more to encourage federal agencies to streamline their programs through consolidation, where applicable and with careful planning, to achieve better results. It recently recommended that OMB develop guidance to assist federal agencies in identifying potential grant program consolidation opportunities to promote better outcomes through improved efficiency.

It appears that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is placing a greater emphasis this year on cleaning up the nation’s watersheds. A recent USDA blog post touted that 70 percent of the 100-plus projects under in the first wave of funding though the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) aimed to provide clean and abundant water.

One of the key technical corrections that the Office of Management and Budget and the Council on Financial Assistance Reform made in the revised uniform guidance was to remove references to the Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) and replace them with the term “unique entity identifier.” Therefore, they removed §200.32, Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, and reserved the citation. OMB said that this change was “consistent with administration priorities to technically refine existing regulations,” adding that “the specific standard for this unique entity identifier will be in accordance with the requirements of the System for Award Management (SAM.gov)."

(The following was excerpted from an article in the Single Audit Information Service.) New York City’s Office of Management and Budget planned to strengthen controls over its Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Assistance (CDBG-DR) reimbursements to ensure that all grant costs charged are eligible and necessary and are adequately documented, in response to a recent Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit.

(The following was excerpted from an article in the Federal Grants Management Handbook.) Institutions with researchers conducting dual use research of concern (DURC) under Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and cooperative agreements must establish an institutional review entity (IRE) by September 2015 to evaluate the benefits and risks of such research, according to a new NIH policy.

Oops. Whoops. My mistake. Typo. Do-over. Got an eraser? Where’s the White-Out?