Information on the Federal Program: Assistance Listing Number 93.600 – Head Start Cluster, United States Department of Health & Human Services. Pass-Through Entity: N/A. Award Number: 10CH011432. Compliance Requirements: Reporting. Type of Finding: Material Noncompliance.
Criteria: The entity should have a system of internal controls in place to ensure submission of applicable reports on a timely basis.
Condition: During our compliance testing, we noted the SF-429 report was not submitted as required.
Cause: We believe accounting staff turnover and inexperienced replacements during the year under audit were led to the lack of and/or failure in internal controls.
Effect: The required report was not submitted to the agency.
Identification of Repeat Finding: This is not a repeat finding.
Recommendation: Staff turnover appears to have stabilized with the new finance director and the changes she implemented related to procedures and staffing. CSC may consider obtaining part-time or temporary assistance to help with fiscal year clean-up/close out to avoid similar problems with the accounting records in the current fiscal year due to a lack of time for current staff to prepare the accounting records while also performing their normal duties.
Action Taken: We concur with the recommendation and have begun adding staff and restructuring the Finance Department. We have brought in 3 contract employees to assist with audits, have added an operations supervisor to assist with internal control implementations, and are actively recruiting a temporary accounting tech and a permanent accounting analyst to round out our team. We have also restricted the area of supervision of the grants supervisor to grants only rather than all financial operations. Given the large number of grants processed through CSC, we believe that having an individual dedicated to ensuring compliance on our grants will ensure that this type of significant deficiency will not continue.
Names(s) and Title(s) of Responsible Person(s): Katie Henry, Finance Director