(The following was excerpted from a recent article in the Single Audit Information Service.) U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) leadership is taking steps to ensure its various offices understand their enforcement authority and consider suspension and debarment for noncompliant recipients in its federal award programs, in response to recent recommendations from the USDA Office of Inspector General (OIG).

We are all probably growing weary of the news about all the natural disasters in the last few months, from hurricanes in the Southern states and Puerto Rico, to wildfires in California, and let’s not forget to mention the devastating earthquakes experienced by our neighbors in Mexico. Perhaps the one natural disaster we haven’t mentioned much lately is a tsunami.

(The following was excerpted from a recent article in the Federal Grants Management Handbook.) Grant recipients, when updating their internal grant policies and procedures, should ensure that these updates are reviewed by staff so that the entire organization is aware of the changes and trained on how to follow them, a Maryland city official told attendees at the recent Federal Grants Forum in Baltimore, Md., hosted by Thompson Information Services.

Thanks to the Department of Education (ED), we have included a new phrase — “temporarily inapplicable” — to our vernacular. In my many years of covering federal government regulatory actions, this is the first time I’ve seen an agency use this authority in response to global conditions.

(The following is excerpted from a recent article in the Single Audit Information Service.) To improve Medicaid program integrity, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to provide additional technical assistance to encourage state agencies to suspend payments to providers during investigations of potential fraud, in response to recommendations in a recent HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit.

For this blog post, we’ll switch things around and discuss last things first. Or in this case, we’ll focus solely on the last thing.

(The following was excerpted from a recent article in the Federal Grants Management Handbook.) Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Housing Service (RHS) last year developed a new method to better estimate federal rental assistance to multifamily housing properties and units, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report recommended that RHS routinely monitor and test these estimates to ensure assistance allocations are calculated correctly.

Imagine a world without forms! As the husband of a Girl Scout troop leader who has watched spend her much of her free time gathering, counting and reviewing the required forms for numerous events, I can tell you that completing and collecting such forms is definitely burdensome for both the one filing out the form and the collector of the form. That’s why my eyes widened when I attended a session on “Transforming Grants Compliance” at the DATA Transparency 2017 conference last week in Washington, D.C.