According to Hamilton County Auditor Robin Mills, the county’s new Electronic Grants Management System will help ensure the more than 330,000 Hamilton County residents continue to enjoy all the benefits associated with federal and state grants well into the future.
Mills
“Hamilton County manages up to 100 active grants at any given time, representing hundreds of millions of dollars,” explained Mills. “For decades the county relied on legal pads and Excel spreadsheets to organize, track and manage grants. The federal government is pushing to mandate transparency in all grants, and with our paper process, that mandate would be difficult. Grantees, like the county, run the risk of losing funding because of lost documents, inappropriate payments or reporting non-compliance – in other words, a lack of transparency.”
While the county has done a great job managing its grant program, the prospect of losing all federal and state funding prompted Mills to investigate systems to reduce the heavy paper-laden workload associated with the grants process.
“The biggest challenge was finding a truly configurable system that was affordable and would work with all the grant programs within the county,” said Todd Clevenger, Hamilton County Grant Administrator. “After extensive research it was determined the existing systems were insufficient or too expensive. So, I approached the county’s ISS Department and was told that they could create a system that met 98 percent of our grant management and administrative needs.”
The result was an end-to-end grants administration and management tool that supports all the functional areas of the entire grant lifecycle, ensuring the county provides the required transparency, management and is compliant. This will allow the citizens of Hamilton County to enjoy all the benefits supported by the county’s grant program, including public safety, parks and recreation, healthcare, housing, transportation, social services, education as well as making Hamilton County government more efficient and effective.
“Since deploying the Grants Management System, the grant claims process has been reduced by as much as 40 percent,” said Mills. “Because of built-in alerts, reporting compliance is nearly 100 percent. Data analysis is in real time versus manually reviewing and searching through paper files and the State Board of Accounts (the agency charged with auditing the county) now has online access to grant files from their laptops for real time review. And if that wasn’t enough, the county’s Grant Management System was awarded Best of Indiana.”