By Caroline Berk, Principal, and Lee Parkhill, Manager
This is an iconic phrase from the Declaration of Independence, but you wouldn’t know it because data is missing. Imagine if the entire document were damaged in this way. We’d have to guess how to move the nation forward.
Today, when government funding lacks clarity, we can’t decipher that story either. Was it worthwhile, wasteful, or something more nuanced in between? That’s why government oversight includes the requirement of annual single audits for entities expending at least $1 million in federal funds. On average, there are over 40,000 entities in this category each year across a wide range of programs and services.
However, compliance can be sketchy and findings can go unaddressed. Amid a historically decentralized oversight system, audit results can hide in their own silos. More recently, pandemic-related funding created a spike of grant recipients requiring single audits, putting the oversight process on overload. As a result, good data has been sitting on the vine. But new approaches, with new tools, could help reboot the power of single audits.
Kearney & Company is on the cutting edge of data science and visualization by developing new strategies to give single audit findings a modern makeover. Audit results and their insights don’t have to be siloed anymore; instead, they could be thoughtfully compiled with other data sets to illuminate broader trends across programs, methods, or entities. Oversight could have better visibility and be less time-consuming, informing future funding decisions more quickly.
Every single audit tells a story; combined with other stories, Kearney could get a better read on identified deficiencies that could create opportunities for fraud. This would be another stepping stone to our firm becoming better stewards of federal spending by detecting vulnerabilities early and intervening before fraud escalates.
250 years ago, the founders demanded independent accountability with bold clarity. Kearney is helping to move those principles forward with each engagement, replacing murkiness with transparency. We hold these truths to be self-evident: A more perfect union depends on a more perfect understanding of government spending.
Questions About This Topic?
 |
If you’d like to discuss how these insights may apply to your organization, connect with Caroline Berk, Principal.
Email: LinkedIn: |