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Head Start: Comprehensive Approach to Identifying and Addressing Risks Could Help Prevent Grantee Financial Management Weaknesses
 

Head Start is the federal government's single largest investment in early childhood education and care for low-income children. The Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (ACF) manages Head Start and relies on hundreds of different grantees throughout the country to provide services to more than 900,000 children and their families. Program directors, governing bodies and policy groups can use this report to further their understanding of ACF's processes for assessing program risk and improving data collection.

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Head Start: Comprehensive Approach to Identifying and Addressing Risks Could Help Prevent Grantee Financial Management Weaknesses
 

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has many processes it uses to collect information on how well grantees are performing and managing their federal grant funds. But different organizations within ACF conduct these activities, and we could not identify a systematic process that ACF uses to bring together information gained from the different data collection processes.

Recent reports of financial improprieties at a number of Head Start programs around the country raised questions about the effectiveness of the oversight provided by the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in identifying and resolving financial management weaknesses in Head Start grantees.

This testimony presented by the General Accountability Office (GAO) discusses (1) the processes ACF uses to assess the programs' risks, (2) whether those processes could be improved to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information ACF collects on its Head Start grantees, and (3) whether ACF ensures that grantees with financial management weaknesses correct those problems in a timely manner. For more on this report >>> [PDF, 192KB] TEXT

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Head Start: Comprehensive Approach to Identifying and Addressing Risks Could Help Prevent Grantee Financial Management Weaknesses. GAO. 2005. English. [PDF, 192KB].