RAT Board Proposes ID System

The head inspector of stimulus spending on Wednesday issued a formal white paper, imploring the administration to regulate the way federal agencies label awards so they all use a common naming convention for all types of loans, grants and contracts.

The lack of a uniform naming convention for awards is "the single biggest impediment to the kind of transparency that the Recovery Act envisions," said Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

Devaney's document details the technical problem, possible coding schemas and recommendations for immediate action by two federal councils. The RAT board chair raised similar points at a Senate hearing in August on the use of technology to detect fraud. Now he has articulated a formal proposition for spending overseers of the future.

Currently, each agency assigns numbers and/or letters to individual federal grants, which account for more than half a trillion dollars in annual funding, based upon that department's internal policies for coding awards. Federal acquisition regulations dictate how agencies are to ID contracts, but the guidelines are not specific, Devaney writes.

"One recommendation that would likely ease future reporting would be a standard Award ID structure with no hyphens or spaces. In addition, requiring that any alphabetical characters be capitalized and refraining from using any zeros or 'O's in the award ID would help to stave off reporting mistakes. Admittedly, human error will always be present; individuals can still mistakenly transcribe numbers, just as is occasionally done with credit card or telephone numbers. However, standardization of award IDs should significantly reduce such errors by limiting the types of errors that could be made," the white paper states.

Devaney then goes on to advise the Chief Financial Officers Council's Grants Policy Committee to establish a new policy on the use of a uniform, governmentwide award ID for federal financial assistance awards. He suggests that the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council propose a rule for a unique governmentwide contract vehicle identifier.

And then, so as not to create even more confusion, the two councils must "work together to ensure consistency between the two groups' approaches."