The Office of Inspector General’s final report details the Audit of the SEC’s Compliance With the DATA Act for Fiscal Year 2019

Why did the SEC perform this Audit?

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) requires the Inspector General of each Federal Agency to assess the completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and quality of their component agency’s spending data and the agency’s implementation and use of the data standards.  Therefore, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) conducted an audit of the SEC ‘s compliance with the DATA Act with respect to the SEC’s fiscal year 2019 first quarter data submitted to the U.S. Department of Treasury.  You can read the audit in its entirety here.

What were the Audit findings?

The SEC’s controls were generally found to be adequate and effective to ensure DATA Act compliance, however, the SEC can further improve its processes related to the DATA Act.

What can the SEC do to improve its processes related to the DATA Act?

1. Update aspects of the Office of Financial Management’s Reference Guide to ensure that it:
   1. Accurately reflects the Office of Financial Management’s processes for reviewing and correcting exceptions in the SEC’s DATA Act quarterly submissions, an information related to the USASpending.gov; and
   1. Reflects correct program activity names and data element headings in Appendix B; and
   1. Incorporates the SEC’s Data Quality Plan.
2. Verify that the program activity codes, program activity names, and data elements in File B are correct before the SEC certified and publishes File B to the Treasury DATA Act Broker (Broker).

File B refers to Object Class and Program Activity; Data submitted by agency. The Broker is a system that received agency data, validates the data against the Schema, and tests linkages between financial data produced by agencies with other spending data on Federal awards, including grants, loans, and procurement data.  Schema, or DATA Act Information Model Schema, gives an overall view of the hundreds of distinct data elements used to explain how Federal dollars are spent. 

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