City finance staff point to new grants office policies and Workday controls after single audit findings

At the Sept. 17 Committee of the Whole hearing, the city's grants management staff described several corrective steps taken after the FY24 single audit flagged deficiencies in the city's grant practices, including missing documentation on grant agreements, absent Unique Entity Identifiers and inadequate subrecipient monitoring.

Ashley Meyer, director of the Grants Management Office in the Department of Finance, said the single audit covered nine major federal programs for FY24 and identified core issues such as missing UEI and federal award numbers on executed agreements, subrecipient monitoring and late or incomplete reporting. "The single audit covered 9 major programs in fiscal 24, and the program findings centered around some very core issues," Ashley Meyer said.

Meyer told the council her office has drafted a grantee transformation plan through FY28 and, together with the Bureau of Accounting and Payroll Services (BAPS), proposed two administrative manual policies addressing subrecipient monitoring and UEI procedures; she said both policies were approved by the Board of Estimates on Sept. 17. The Grants Management Office also said it completed a citywide grants needs assessment with responses from 18 grant-receiving agencies, secured GMS portal access to prevent single-point-of-failure drawdowns, and made the GMO the final approver for grant award creation in Workday.

Danielle Tillman, acting chief of BAPS, described technical steps to address accounting delays and mapping issues, including consulting with Workday partners to correct mapping errors introduced when the city first adopted the software. "We worked with one of our consulting partners in Workday as well with the IT and accounting staff," Tillman said, adding that the team implemented a 30-day bank reconciliation metric starting in July 2026 and expects to avoid repeat payroll-account reconciliation findings.

Officials emphasized training and redundancy. Meyer said monthly grants trainings attract 90-100 attendees, and new Workday requirements now force agencies to enter billing and reporting milestones at award setup to reduce missed drawdown and reporting deadlines. She also said the GMO will verify subaward status before award approval and maintain redundancy for UEI management so agencies are not locked out of federal systems.

Auditors reiterated that clearing federal compliance findings requires both corrective procedures and time to test sustained operation; some findings that were corrected in prior years were removed in the most recent audit cycle, and officials said they expect more findings to be cleared as corrective steps are tested and sustained.