Single Audit: Single Audit Act Effectiveness Issues

GAO's review of the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation efforts to ensure that federal award recipients corrected single audit findings found that required documentation of management decisions and the evaluation of and conclusions on the adequacy of recipient actions to correct single audit findings was lacking. The Federal Audit Clearinghouse received 34,000 single audit reports during calendar year 2000 with six thousand of these containing audit findings. Despite these impressive figures, questions exist about whether (1) all required single audits are performed, (2) federal award recipients are adequately monitoring subrecipent use of federal awards and the correction of single audit findings, and (3) the audits are performed in accordance with government auditing standards.