2022-001 ? Financial Close and Reporting (Material Weakness in Internal Control Over Financial Reporting) - Repeated (Prior Year Finding 2021-001) Management Response: The Tribe has continued to develop the fiscal department by hiring three employees (two full-time and one part-time for the fiscal department. The new employees completed accounting courses conducted by professional entities in the field of governmental and tribal fund accounting such as the GFOA, NAFOA, Moss Adams, and Oklahoma State University. The Tribe has continued to retain the services of a CPA consultant to train and assist them as needed. The Tribe has budgeted for an increase in indirect funding in discussion with the BIA's indirect cost services and implemented a process for budgeting. The Tribe has implemented an online grant management system (CGMS) to document and monitor all the approved grants more accurately. The Tribe conducted a quarterly review for the stale checks in compliance with the Tribe fiscal policy to void outstanding checks over 90 days regularly. The fiscal department created a new GL account as "Unclaimed Property" to record the voided outstanding checks. The fiscal department created new procedures and updated the existing ones such as the Accounts Payable and Cash Handling procedures. The fiscal department created new forms for check requests, drawdowns, invoice requests, and transfer requests which created more control and supervision over the expenditures and grant management by adding and requesting more information such as award number, effective date, indirect calculation, budgets, balance for grants, etc. Another activity conducted by the fiscal department to ensure the accuracy of transactions is to reconcile accounts on a monthly basis. The fiscal department created a monthly binder for the Wiyot Tribe's monthly Council Meeting that consists of 16 different sections including but not limited to financial statements, Bank Reconciliations for all accounts, Journal Vouchers, AP reports, AR reports, drawdowns, and invoice requests. This cumulative monthly report is accompanied by a Month-end Closing form in which all the fiscal activities are listed according to the performer, date of performance, and status of the activities. This form is signed by the Fiscal staff, fiscal manager, and Tribal administrator and presented to the Council members and the Tribal Treasurer for review and approval. This form helps to indicate the accuracy of the attached fiscal reports and assure the Council that the required activities were performed by the fiscal department. The month-end closing report will assist the fiscal department in performing account reconciliation in a timely manner throughout the year rather than the year-end closeout. Another activity conducted by the fiscal department to address this finding was reviving the accounts receivable of the Tribe. The new form for invoice requests was created and applied for all departments to use. This form helps to accumulate all the payments for different services conducted by the Tribal departments for outside customers, which increases internal control and diminishes the risk of fraud. The drawdown process is also moved to the AR rather than journal vouchers which helps the Departments to trace their awards' financial activities with more accuracy and enables the fiscal to perform its financial activities regarding grant management including indirect cost calculation and expenditure/revenue recording precisely and correctly. To fix the issue with the 941 reports, the Tribe will provide a procedure regarding the production and submission of 941 reports for each quarter that specifies assigned duties for each involved employee. These reports will be included in the month-end closing form submitted to the Council and the Treasurer in each quarter which will help to oversee the procedure and ensure its completion for each quarter. Anticipated Completion Date: 12/31/2023 Responsible Party: Michelle Vassel, Tribal Administrator Farzad Forouhar, Fiscal Manager