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CONTROLLER ALERT: ACKNOWLEDGING INCONSISTENT RECORDS FOR A SUBSET OF PUBLIC FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE DATA FOR ENTITY ADDRESS ZIP+4

Posted By CFO Council on April 03, 2017

Controller Alerts are designed to highlight emerging financial management issues that may require agency attention or action. These Alerts are intended to inform the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) community of key issues where the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) believes further action may be warranted, but do not constitute official guidance or prescribe specific tasks for agencies beyond consideration of appropriate steps to address the issue.

The purpose of this Controller Alert is to acknowledge that entity addresses for a subset of financial assistance records on USAspending.gov may have values in the ZIP+4 field that are different from their authoritative source in the System for Award Management (SAM).

Pursuant to the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA), Public Law 109-282, Federal agencies report information about their financial assistance awards for display on USAspending.gov. The requirements were expanded by the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act), Public Law 113-101, which amended FFATA. OMB subsequently issued implementation guidance and requirements for agencies as reflected in OMB Memoranda M-15-12 MPM-2016-03, and M-17-04.

SAM is an official website of the U.S. Government where entities register to do business with the Federal Government. Part 25 of Title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations includes requirements for specific entities to be registered in SAM prior to submitting an application for a financial assistance award. Additionally, M-17-04 requires agencies to ensure that the registration data they submit about financial assistance awardees matches with the information in SAM, including the awardee’s physical address. OMB, the Department of the Treasury, and Federal awarding agencies are currently working together on a new reporting mechanism that will improve data quality of public information once implementation is complete. In this interim period, in order to maximize the accuracy and completeness of the data that agencies are able to provide, OMB acknowledges that for a subset of reported financial assistance records, the ZIP+4 field for entity address will not match the authoritative source in SAM. This acknowledgement stands until a new reporting mechanism is put in place.

Please contact SpendingTransparency@omb.eop.gov with any questions.

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