OSM grants and program specialists work closely with individual grantees, becoming familiar with grantee offices, procedures and staff. Annual grants for these programs are basically continuation awards, scheduled to begin on known dates. Because of all these factors, we consider that the risk of waste, fraud or abuse of Federal funds due to the use of electronic transmission of data for these programs is very low. These programs should be converted to electronic processing in phase 1. It does not call for a long-term relationship between OSM and the recipients.
Eligibility is much wider, since the agreements are available to private non-profit organizations.
These agreements are therefore considered higher risk than regulatory and AML grants. OSM should consider electronic processing for this program at a later phase in the electronic grants development process. Within the life cycles of AML, regulatory and SOAP grants, there are several processes or steps. The team evaluated these steps to assess the relative risk level involved in each step in the current system. Events with lower current risk assessments were selected for the initial phase of electronic processing.