Posts Tagged ‘improper payments’
Agencies To Begin Using Do Not Pay Web Site
Federal awarding officials now have a new tool to help them confirm individual and entity eligibility before making any grant, loan, contract, or benefit payment. Launched today, the new Do Not Pay List web site is a single point of entry for accessing relevant data.
The portal allows federal agencies to to access data sources including the Death Master File, the Excluded Parties List System, Treasury’s Debt Check Database, and the List of Excluded Individuals and Entities. The site also offers data analysis of information from other sources that are not currently available through the portal, such as prison information and several privately available sources.
OMB Memo 12-11 directs federal agencies to submit to OMB a draft of the agency’s plan for using this new tool by June 30, 2012. OMB will review those plans and agencies will finalize them no later than Aug. 31,2012.
Join the Conversation About Recovery Act Oversight
Log in next week (Oct. 17-24) to join an online conversation discussing ways to prevent fraud and abuse in federally funded Recovery Act programs. This week-long public dialog is sponsored by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Academy of Public Administration.
While the scope of this discussion will focus primarily on oversight of Recovery Act funds, the sponsors are also interested in ideas related to the oversight of other federal spending that might be applicable to Recovery Act dollars.
Some of the questions to be addressed include:
The board and the academy encourage a variety of participants from the general public, state and local governments, the private sector, the nonprofit field, and academia. For more information, visit the dialog’s page on Facebook or go to http://www.fedaccountabilitydialogue.org.
Grant recipients (both pass-through entities and subrecipients) may want to take note of an interesting item in OMB’s recent guidance on implementation of the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act (PL 111-204).
OMB says that for grant programs, agencies must consider payment recapture audits at the grant recipient level. “Federal agencies should work with state and local governments to ensure that they have enough resources to conduct payment recapture audits (for example, through direct funding, allowable administrative expenses, or contingency contracts),” OMB writes. It continues, “[G]enerally, federal agencies should not look to pass-through entities for repayment of improper payments identified by payment recapture audits for funds they pass-through until repayment has been made by the sub-recipient or the final payee.”
On this last point, I think it’s important to note that OMB is only referring to monies that were identified in recapture audits.
How agencies will implement this memo remains to be seen, but I thought some might find OMB’s take on the matter interesting.
You can view the complete OMB memo guidance here.