Grant Accountability and Transparency Act (GATA)

​In response to federal Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) effective December 2014 and the Grant Accountability and Transparency Act (GATA) effective July 2014, Illinois implemented a statewide initiative to establish a compliant, uniform framework for grant management. GATA is a collaborative effort between grant making agencies and the grantee community to standardize policies and procedures and remove redundancy in grant management. The initial implementation focus is on the pre-award phase which includes documentation of funding opportunities through the issuance of grant awards.

There are  two centralized systems under the grant pre-award phase for GATA that are still in development – the grantee registration portal and risk assessments. Staggered implementation will not delay our FY17 grant award process.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) will outline and communicate with each of its vendors the budget and grant agreement requirements for each program administered by the department.

For FY17, all grantee and/or contracted agencies must register with the State of Illinois through an automated grantee portal. DCFS and the GATA website will promote the grantee portal as soon as it is available. Grantees will be instructed to register in the portal as a final step for FY17 grant execution. Grantees will access the portal from the GATA website. Registration will include verification of six statuses: current DUNS number, current SAM Cage Code, good standing with the Illinois Secretary of State, Illinois debarred and suspended list, Federal excluded parties list and the HFS Sanctioned Party list. A real-time response will be returned confirming that the grantee is qualified for a grant award, not qualified but can remediate the specific issue, or not qualified due to a debarred status. (Please note: Under prior federal regulation, agencies were mandated to perform similar verifications. New procedures centralize and automate the verification eliminating agencies from performing separate verifications.)

Grantee risk assessments continue to be required under Uniform Guidance and GATA. New regulations require the assessment to be conducted prior to awarding a grant. In FY17, risk assessments will be performed as a final requirement for grant awards. The financial and administrative risk assessment has been centralized and will be performed once for each grantee through an automated questionnaire from the GATA website. Each grantee must complete an Internal Controls Questionnaire (ICQ) which will calculate the fiscal and administrative risk profile of the grantee. Specific conditions may be imposed if the grantee is determined to be higher risk. The automated ICQ has not been implemented, yet. DCFS and the GATA website will promote the automated ICQ as soon as it is available.