Television commercials can often generate the greatest expressions. Lately, I’ve been thinking about a 1980s-era Wendy’s commercial where they feature the tagline “Parts is parts!” Why? Just consider where we stand with the 2017 Office of Management and Budget Compliance Supplement.

Most of you are aware that OMB issues the Compliance Supplement annually to assist auditors in conducting compliance testing of award recipient grant programs. OMB generally issues a draft version of the supplement to the audit community early in the year to review potential changes OMB plans to make to that year’s version. During the summer, it releases the final version and posts it on its website.

After an extensive wait this year, OMB finally approved the 2017 version of the supplement in August. The final version essentially was not changed from the draft version it released earlier in the year, although it did include references to the revised Frequently Asked Questions document OMB released this month as well. So what about the “parts” comment from before? Well, OMB traditionally posts the supplement on its website as a complete PDF, but it also would break out the supplement into its various parts, available in either a PDF or Word format. This makes it much more manageable for those perusing through the 1,000-page-plus supplement.

However, this year, OMB has informed us that it has released the final 2017 supplement, but only in its full format. We’ll have to wait a while before we’ll see it divided by part. We contacted OMB officials last week to find out when we can expect it to be presented online by part, and they told us that their “new site has limitations for items displayed,” and that they are “working on getting the individual sections out to the community on a different site.” We’ve yet to hear back as to what the link is for this new site. Once we receive word, we’ll let you know on this blog.

We’ll look forward to seeing the 2017 supplement in the part-by-part format. Until then, we’ll manage with the extensive scrolling to in the huge PDF to find the information we need. Stay tuned.

Let us know if you are having issues with finding needed information using the current huge PDF of the complete supplement. We’d like to hear your experiences.