In preparation for your next financial reporting cycle, you’ll need to consider updating your schedule of expenditures of federal awards (SEFA). A few changes to the presentation are required by the Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards (uniform guidance). These changes are effective for financial statement audits of fiscal years beginning on or after December 26, 2014.
Note that making these changes to your organization’s SEFA isn’t a substitute for reading and understanding the requirements of uniform guidance itself, which may require substantive changes to your organization’s processes and controls surrounding federal awards. (See our uniform guidance page for more.)
The following items are now required to be presented on the face of the SEFA as opposed to in the notes to the SEFA:
It’s important to note for the last item that while auditees may have grouped the cluster in the past, it’s important to include a cluster total dollar amount as well.
Additional changes to notes to the SEFA resulting from implementation of the uniform guidance include:
Loan or loan guarantee programs create unique reporting requirements on the SEFA. Here’s additional information to consider while preparing the SEFA under the uniform guidance:
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Governmental Audit Quality Center is in the process of updating its SEFA tools for auditees, including a SEFA checklist you can complete to ensure you’ve included all the correct information.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is also working on an update to the data collection form (DCF), applicable for audits of periods subject to the uniform guidance audit requirements, to collect the information required to be reported under the uniform guidance. To save time in preparing your DCF, you may want to consider formatting your SEFA in a manner in which it can be easily uploaded to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse when preparing your DCF—including the name of pass-through entities in a column, for example, instead of in a row within the SEFA.
Moss Adams LLP will issue another Alert when OMB makes available the updated data collection form. In the meantime, contact your Moss Adams professional for questions on how these changes will impact your SEFA.