Single Audit / Uniform Guidance Audit Support

Single Audits (sometimes referred to as Uniform Guidance or Yellow Book Audits), are comprehensive financial & compliance audits for grantees that drawdown over $1 million in federal grant funds during their fiscal year. This type of audit is different from a DCAA audit, and focuses on a financial statement audit along with an extensive review of how your business complied with federal regulations for each of your federal grants (simply put: the purpose is to ensure the funds were used correctly). Single audits identify weaknesses in internal controls and help verify accountability, and they are only performed by third party CPA firms with experience in government grants (contact us for referrals if you need help finding a CPA firm to provide the audit).

While the Single Audit itself is often an expensive process (with many CPA firms charging tens of thousands of dollars to perform the audit), if your business already uses a DCAA compliant accounting system and maintains it properly (in-house or with the support of an outsourced government contract accounting firm like ReliAscent), passing the audit is usually fairly quick and painless. However, many small business government grantees do not have a compliant system in place (especially if they have only won grants with HHS/NIH and NSF for example, but never worked with the Defense Department), and depending on the state of their books and a few other factors, the amount of support they may require from ReliAscent can vary greatly from company to company.

Getting Your Business Through the Audit

ReliAscent® supports companies through the Single Audit process in two ways:

If you are already a monthly accounting client of ReliAscent® - your accounting team will take you through the audit with the auditing CPA firm, and the process is relatively quick and easy. As we maintain a DCAA compliant accounting system for all of our clients, the robust financial tracking, timekeeping, and other policies and procedures that we implement are more than sufficient to meet the various requirements of the audit. In most cases, this means very little additional cost to the client from our side, in addition to the cost of the Single Audit itself (charged by the CPA firm).
If your company performed the accounting internally, or outsourced it to a third party - ReliAscent® can review your accounting system, policies and procedures, financial controls, etc., provide guidance as needed to address compliance gaps and errors, and get your business audit-ready. The amount of time and cost involved in this process varies greatly from company to company, and is very dependent upon the state of your books and if you followed all of the proper policies & procedures that should have been implemented (and if you need audits performed for more than one year).

Failing your single audit can result in serious financial consequences, from losing your federal funding to being barred from future federal awards, and/or needing to repay the government for any improperly used funds. So, it is important to ensure your business has the proper accounting system and practices in place, and that you have an expert to support you through the process.