The Office of Cost Standards and Policy provides a wide range of services and oversight to ensure that the university complies with cost principles and accounting standards set forth by the U.S. government. This office plans, organizes and provides financial analysis and develops and maintains special ongoing cost studies for the university, such as the Facilities and Administrative Rate proposal.
Roles & Responsibilities
- Deriving and negotiation the University’s Facilities and Administrative (F&A) rate
- Preparing the University’s federal Disclosure Statement (DS-2)
- Ensuring compliance with the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) cost accounting standards with specific focus on the following:
- CAS 501 - Consistency in Estimating, Accumulating, and Reporting Costs
- CAS 502 – Consistency in Allocating Costs
- CAS 505 – Accounting for Unallowable Costs
- CAS 506 – Cost Accounting Period
- Ensuring that federal circulars such as the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) are consistently applied when determining the allowability of costs on sponsored programs or identifying the distinctions between direct and indirect costs for sponsored programs
- Reviewing recharge/service center proposals and associated activity
- Identification of the functional classification of accounts (Uniform Accounting Structure)
- Management of the functional classification of space in the University’s space management system, FacilitiesLink
- Building and maintaining cost accounting interfaces and structure within systems to continuously improve cost accounting standards processes and reporting
- Ad-hoc analysis and reporting using institutional financial data to identify things such as potential areas of risk or the correlations in the usage of expense coding (sub and object codes)