There are valuable best practices that your non profit organization can implement to ensure an efficient and successful single audit:

  1. Keep up to date on all the latest guidance and developments: This includes being aware of changes introduced by the Uniform Guidance. Organizations should take advantage of the numerous free tools related to the Uniform Guidance that the AICPA Governmental Audit Quality Center (GAQC) provides to auditees in its Auditee Resource Center. These audit tools can be found at www.aicpa.org/GAQC and include articles, web events, practice aids and useful links.

  2. Get started on the right foot: At the beginning of the fiscal year, the finance department should collaborate with the other organizational departments that may be applying for federal funds. As part of the collaboration process, the roles and responsibilities for staff members are identified and assigned. The assigned responsibilities include completing grant applications, approval of applications and revisions, entering the budgets, expenditure approvals to ensure compliance, requesting funds and submitting the completion report. While all employees work together, there is proper segregation of duties, to ensure a adequate system of internal controls.

  3. Offer targeted training to your staff: This ensures that the staff is performing their work accurately and in accordance with the terms of the grant agreement. For eg. staff should be trained so that they can spot whether expenditures are allowable under the grant agreement.

  4. Identify and address problem areas in advance: When potential trouble spots have been identified, these should be closely monitored to ensure compliance. For eg. areas that have caused problems in the past should be closely reviewed to prevent issues from reoccurring. Additionally, the grantor agency may require a significant amount of supporting documentation such as cancelled checks, evidence of drawdowns and other documents that are time consuming to pull together. Team members should start pulling together the supporting documents on a monthly basis. This cuts down on possible delays during the audit.