GRANTS MANAGEMENT

Under the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary for Administration (CFO/ASA), the Office of Acquisition Management and Financial Assistance (OAMFA) is responsible for the Department’s enterprise-wide grants management policy and oversight.

The Department’s focus is to standardize policy and procedures for its grant and cooperative agreement programs, continue to streamline operations while strengthening compliance, work towards a single automated grants management system, and enhance/formalize workforce education. Targeted efforts are underway to transform the decentralized Department grants management community into an effective and efficient partnership. The sharing of resources and responsibilities to accomplish enterprise goals is a recurring theme throughout the partnership effort.

The Department is an active participant with the government-wide implementation of Public Law (PL) 106-107 (The Grants Streamlining Initiative) to simplify and automate the grants process, including participation on several related interagency workgroups.

OAMFA coordinates quarterly Departmental Grants Council meetings and works closely with the OIG and General Counsel to implement sound policy and ensure consistency for the Department’s financial assistance programs. The Department is committed to the goal of strengthening its grant operations and improving its business processes to provide better services to its customers in the federal grant recipient community. An active partner in e-grants initiatives, OAMFA serves on the Grants.gov Executive Board and the Grants Line of Business Taskforce, participating in workgroups and pilot activities. The Department is now fully compliant with Grants.gov, and has revised its Grants and Cooperative Agreements Manual and Standard Grants Terms and Conditions to recognize the emerging growth of electronic government.

Integral to the Department’s effort to move aggressively into the world of e-grants is the continued utilization of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Grants Online System, a back-office solution to the Grants.gov’s storefront. The system, which went live in January 2005, was designed to facilitate efficiencies through standardized business processes and provide a direct interface to other Departmental systems. It has demonstrated significant potential for reducing paperwork, increasing accountability, simplifying the application process, and is being considered for enterprise-wide implementation. The Department has taken additional steps to adapt its operational structure and business processes to the streamlined vision of federal grants operation expressed in PL 106-107. The goal is to create a performance-based culture utilizing value-added business processes with maximum use of automation for improved timeliness and quality of service delivery.

OAMFA’s responsibility for approval of recipient indirect cost rates continued throughout the fiscal year. Incorporating a significantly higher level of financial review and analysis into the process in FY 2006, OAMFA noted several instances where the new procedures resulted in financial savings to the Department through indirect cost rate adjustments from grantee’s rate proposed. As resources permit, OAMFA would like to leverage the results of some indirect cost rate analyses to identify and manage higher risk grantees.