Finding Text
Significant Deficiency in Internal Control Over Compliance and Noncompliance – Inadequate Payroll Review and Documentation
B. Allowable Costs/Cost Principles
Criteria:
Per 2 CFR § 200.430(g), charges to federal awards for salaries and wages must be based on records that accurately reflect the work performed and are supported by a system of internal control which provides reasonable assurance that the charges are accurate, allowable, and properly allocated. As part of ELI’s internal controls, time and effort documentation, such as employee salary and wage allocations, should be reviewed and approved by ELI to confirm accuracy and consistency with policies or approvals.
Condition and Context:
We haphazardly selected three months of payroll allocations which included 23 individuals. Our sample was not statistically valid.
During our testing of payroll expenses charged to the federal program, we noted controls in place were not sufficient to ensure the amounts charged to the award were properly reviewed and approved to ensure amounts charged agreed to those approved to be charged. This resulted in three errors identified in our testing:
January payroll allocations were based on the approved budget, but the amounts charged differed from the budgeted amounts resulting in known questioned costs of $1,014. This impacted 18 of the 23 individuals selected for testing.
Two individuals charged to the award had time which was not approved to be charged to the award resulting in known questioned costs of $8,395 and likely questioned costs of $31,717. Likely questioned costs were calculated by quantifying the total amount of payroll for these individuals which were charged to the federal award.
Paid time off and holiday pay were not allocated to the awards at the approved allocation rate throughout 2024. This resulted in the cost being under-allocated by $1,924 which did not result in any known question costs.
Cause and Effect:
Management was working to establish improved controls for reviewing and approving payroll expenses charged to federal awards. This ultimately resulted in establishing a monthly review of all payroll charges to federal awards starting in July 2024. However, management did not include any detective controls to review that approved payroll allocations were being implemented as intended. This resulted in the errors noted above.
Recommendation:
We recommend that management establish detective controls to ensure payroll expenses are being charged consistently with established policies and approved allocations.
Views of Responsible Officials and Planned Corrective Action:
We agree with the recommendation and portions of the plan were implemented in February 2024, while the remainder was implemented in July 2025.
In January 2024, the ELI team reviewed team members and their respective salary allocations, specifically for the Early Head Start program. Allocations were documented and updated in Axiom, ELI’s payroll system of record. Those allocations were then updated in early February 2024 and regular meetings to review, document and update allocations as needed, have since been held on a consistent basis. The secondary piece, corrected in July 2025, was a system correction for allocation of PTO and Holiday pay, those were not being allocated to EHS consistent with the agreed upon allocations and not going to EHS as they should have been. This has been corrected in Axiom and the ELI accounting team will now perform regular reviews to confirm allocation in agreement with the agreed upon amounts. In addition, correcting entries for 2024 and 2025 will be made by August 31, 2025.