One of the outstanding items that the US Department of Education identified in ASG’s Plan of Correction for removal of the high risk designation for the American Samoa Department of Education relates to ASG Treasury policies and procedures for on going monitoring.
ASG is required to submit periodic reports to explain actions they’ve taken to improve areas which led to the federal agency placing ASDOE under high risk.
After reviewing the ASG report for the period ending March 31, 2016, USDOE said it was leaving open all 12 outstanding items in American Samoa’s corrective action plan.
The feds said, “While its encouraged by ASG’s progress in addressing the outstanding items. ASG did not make significant enough progress towards completing or implementing the necessary actions to resolve the outstanding items during this reporting period.
USDOE noted that ASG has submitted a draft ASG Treasury policies and Procedures manual regarding on going monitoring.
However it said the procedures in the two page draft document contract the procedures establish in the most recent version of the ASG Treasury Standard Operating Procedures.
The feds recommend that ASG when developing a new section or revising certain sections of its existing Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to incorporate the revisions into its existing SOP so that the revision will be reflected in its official SOP, rather than to have the revisions as an unofficial document.
USDOE noted that the draft on going monitoring process assigns the monitoring responsibilities to a high level staff, but it lacks detailed procedures.
It recommends that ASG include in its revised procedures specific action steps for each task, including supervisor’s review and approval process, as well as a timeline for each of the action items.
The federal agency observes that ASG submitted sample excel worksheets created by the Chief Accountant for reconciling, tracking and monitoring federal grants and identify and resolve the differences for revenues, expenditures, Accounts Receivable and cash drawdown.
However it was not clear to USDOE, the source of data used in identifying the cause and determining the amount of discrepancies.
Also the draft policies do not provide adequate guidance on how to detect and review for error in tracking and managing grant activities, including duplicate bookings, missing bookings, and calculation errors.
USDOE is encouraging ASG to continue refining its on going monitoring policies, and ensuring employees comply with the monitoring requirements, so that deficiencies would not be repeated as findings in audits.
