Overview
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) was signed on September 26, 2006. The intent is to empower every American with the ability to hold the government accountable for each spending decision. The goal is to reduce wasteful spending in the government.
The FFATA legislation requires information on federal awards (federal financial assistance and expenditures) be made available to the public via a single, searchable website, which is USAspending.gov. Guidance issued by the OMB on August 27, 2010, states that all first tier subawards greater than or equal to $30,000 on Federal Grants & Contracts issued on or after October 1, 2010, were included in the act.
This information is reported on by the Prime Awardee (e.g., Harvard) through the FFATA Subaward Reporting System (FSRS). This reporting system for Federal prime awardees (prime grants recipients and prime contractors) is used to capture and report subaward data regarding their first-tier subawards to meet the FFATA reporting requirements.
Reporting
The Office for Sponsored Programs (OSP) serves as the FFATA Reporter for Harvard University. Each month, OSP reports on any subagreement or subamendment that meets the criteria described above (FFATA flag is set to “Yes”) and has been fully executed in the prior month.
Information required to be reported in the FSRS system includes information about the prime award as well as information about the subagreement or subamendment that has been fully executed including: Subrecipient Name, UEI, subrecipient #, amount issued, and date fully executed. In addition, the primary place of performance and a statement of work, no longer than 4,000 characters must be reported.
To support FFATA reporting requirements, two new fields have been added to the GMAS subagreement module and must be populated when the FFATA flag is set to “Yes” on the subagreement:
- Primary Place of Performance: This must be entered by the department at either initial proposal (if known), or when requesting the subagreement draft. The subagreement draft request may be locked and routed without this information, but it must be entered before signatures on the subagreement can be recorded in GMAS by the Central Office (HSM, HSPH, or OSP). If entered after lock and route, the Central Office (HMS, HSPH, OSP) will enter the primary place of performance when received from the subrecipient.
- FFATA statement of work summary: This field is a 4,000 character text field. If a subagreement is subject to FFATA reporting requirements, a statement of work summary, no longer than 4,000 characters must be entered by the department before the initial subagreement draft request may be locked and routed. For subamendments, the FFATA statement of work summary is not required to be entered unless the statement of work is changing in that subamendment. If the statement of work is changing, the Update FFATA Statement of Work Summary Required Actions Attribute should be selected in the GMAS subamendment draft request and the revised FFATA statement of work summary entered. A revised statement of work document must also be uploaded.
Updating the FFATA Flag
All new subagreements associated to prime awards with a Federal sponsor will have the FFATA flag set automatically to “Yes”. If a Department Administrator discovers that the subagreement is not subject to FFATA reporting requirements (this is not common), they should contact their Central Office’s member of the OSP^FFATA Editor – University wide standing team to have the FFATA flag updated to “No.”