Problems Involved With Grant Auditing

A review was made of the audit experience of Federal grant recipients. The review showed that grant auditing is, as the title of a recent report called it, "a maze of inconsistency, gaps, and duplication that needs overhauling." The number of times a recipient was audited sometimes varied widely, from no audits to more than 50. Mandatory audit requirements lead to inefficiency and waste of time and money. More flexible requirements would allow for adjustments in audit coverage to ensure that the most productive use is made of audit resources. Unless these problems are corrected, many grants will continue to evade the scrutiny which the audit system is designed to provide, while in other cases funds will be unnecessarily spent in overauditing.