Internal Controls for ARPA SLFRF

Municipalities that received award funds through the SLFRF program are required to monitor compliance of eligible uses and ensure no fraud, waste, or abuse is associated with their funds. 

Eligible uses are specified by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Interim Final Rule, but in general, award funds are intended to support households, small businesses, impacted industries, essential workers, and communities hardest hit by the pandemic. SLFRF recipients can also use the funds to make investments in water, sewer, and broadband infrastructure. 

Issued in June, “SLFRF Compliance and Reporting Guidance” details compliance and reporting responsibilities under the SLFRF program. The document dubs SLFRF recipients the “first line of defense,” responsible for monitoring award funds, implementing internal controls, maintaining a “robust documentation and compliance regime,” among other duties that all contribute to “upholding program integrity and trust in all levels of government.”

While key principles and internal controls best practices (Figure 1) are included in the guidance, SLFRF recipients are largely tasked with developing their own effective compliance regimes.

How ThirdLine can help

ThirdLine detects fraud, waste, and abuse before it leaves a municipality’s door. 

With ThirdLine, municipalities have a library of 400+ data analytics running continuously to monitor awards funds and detect fraud, waste, and abuse at the transactional level across 10 areas: 

• Accounts Payable
• Accounts Receivable 
• General Ledger 
• Human Resources
• Payroll
• Purchasing Card
• Purchasing
• Separation of Duties
• Travel & Expense
• Vendors
  

ThirdLine is not another ERP system; it's an analytics layer on top of existing data in Tyler Munis™ and other ERP systems. The only requirement for the simple integration is a backup copy of the database or a few data tables of which we can provide the SQL code to get.

With every refresh of a municipality’s database, ThirdLine analytics update across interactive dashboards, showing users: 

• Where transactions were flagged for risk in a specific financial process (e.g., Payroll) 
• Who was involved in creating and approving the transactions (employees, vendors, etc.) 
• When the transactions were created and approved depending on the preferred audit scope: last week, last quarter, or as far back as the implementation of the ERP system.
  

With ThirdLine technology, municipalities have an automated way to monitor SLFRF compliance and pinpoint fraud, waste, and abuse with 400+ internal controls and dashboard reporting. ThirdLine is a quick-and-easy solution to create an “effective compliance regime” for the SLFRF program—with a lasting impact on public transparency and accountability for all municipalities.

ThirdLine is available to municipalities across the U.S.