Audit of the Massachusetts Office on Disability Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An overview of the purpose and process of auditing the Massachusetts Office on Disability.

Overview

In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor (OSA) has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Massachusetts Office on Disability (MOD) for the period July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2018.

We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer and the conclusion we reached regarding the objective.

Objective	Conclusion
Does MOD properly administer its municipal grant program, including authorizing, recording, and monitoring?	Yes

 

To achieve our objective, we gained an understanding of the internal controls we deemed significant to the objective and evaluated the design and effectiveness of controls related to the awarding of municipal grants.

In addition, we performed the following procedures to obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to address our audit objective.

We obtained from both MOD and the Massachusetts Management Accounting and Reporting System (MMARS) a list of the 53 Americans with Disabilities Act municipal grants MOD awarded during our audit period and selected a judgmental, nonstatistical sample of 10 for testing. We reviewed the original files for each of the 10 municipal grants for compliance with financial and programmatic requirements. Specifically, we determined whether MOD maintained communications with the grantee cities and towns to verify that progress was being made on projects for which grants were awarded and whether each municipality’s final grant report was properly submitted to, and reviewed by, MOD management. We reviewed the narrative submitted with each Payment Request Document (PRC)² to verify that each municipality met its stated goals. We also determined whether the grants were properly recorded in MMARS. Specifically, we reviewed the final PRCs to determine whether they included all supporting documentation, including subcontractor invoices, and were approved by both MOD’s director and its assistant director of finance. Additionally, we verified that the invoices from the cities and towns were properly recorded on the PRCs and entered in MMARS. Finally, we verified that the approved grant contracts and invoice amounts for grant payments agreed with the transactions recorded in MMARS. We reconciled these grant payments with the Office of the Comptroller of the Commonwealth’s CTHRU open records platform.³

In addition to the above, to verify that all cities and towns were notified of grant opportunities, we obtained a list of all 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth and compared it to the lists of cities and towns to which MOD sent notifications via email or the United States Postal Service.

Our samples were judgmentally selected, and therefore we did not project the sample results to the total population.

Data Reliability

In 2018, OSA performed a data reliability assessment of MMARS focused on testing selected system controls (access controls, application controls, configuration management, contingency planning, and segregation of duties) for the period April 1, 2017 through March 31, 2018.

As part of our current audit, we verified that the cost data in the contracts reconciled to the data recorded in MMARS. We performed a data query from MMARS of all grant payments made by MOD to municipalities and verified that the cost data were consistent across data sources. In addition, we obtained the PRCs and verified that their associated payments agreed with the reports and that there were no duplicate transactions recorded in MMARS under the municipal grant capital account.

We determined that the program data supplied by MOD and the financial data in MMARS were sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit.

2.    A PRC is the form state agencies use to make payments to vendors through MMARS for the purchase of goods and services.

3.    CTHRU is a website maintained by the Office of the Comptroller of the Commonwealth to allow public access to state spending and payroll data.

Date published:	April 2, 2019