Federal agency payments to Grants.gov, a central portal for government grant opportunities, don't necessarily correspond to how much they use the site, finds the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO, in a report dated May 6, finds that fees for agencies with comparable usage rates vary widely. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has posted 40 grant opportunities on the site so far this fiscal year and received 4,817 applications. The National Endowment for the Humanities has posted 42 grants and received 4,577 responses. But, HUD is set to pay Grants.gov more than two-and-a-half-times more in fees than NEH--$414,422 to NEH's $155,159.

Grants.gov officials told GAO auditors that 20 percent of their budget comes from flat fees based on participating agency's size. Funding for the project moved to a fee-for-service model in fiscal 2010, which ended on Sept. 30, 2010. GAO auditors found only a "moderate correlation" between an agency's size and its use of Grants.gov.

Some agencies, including the departments of Veterans Affairs, Labor, Transportation, Homeland Security, Treasury and HUD, are paying more in flat fees this year than in variable fees for actual usage of the site, according to GAO data.

The report also finds that Grants.gov doesn't track in detail costs attributable to each agency user of Grants.gov. Although 80 percent of the project's budget depends in equal measure on the number of agency grant opportunities posted and the number of applications submitted in response, it's not clear whether those percentages are reflective of actual costs of the Grants.gov program management office, the report says.

The report finds gaps in tracking costs in other ways, too. Each agency, for instance, is currently allowed two new grant application forms per year, but some agencies request more than that and some fewer. Since each agency's contribution to the website doesn't change depending on the number of forms created each year, agencies that request fewer are subsidizing those who request more, the report adds.

The report also finds that agencies tend to give Grants.gov their fees late in the fiscal year--the bulk of it in the third quarter--which has a bad effect on the website's operations. Program management office officials told auditors that during the first several months of fiscal 2010, several webpages on the site became outdated but there were no funds to replace them.

President Barack Obama, in his fiscal 2012 budget request, proposes merging Grants.gov into the website currently in use to post federal business opportunities, called FedBizOps or FBO. The new site would be called "Federal Opportunities." However, the proposal doesn't include a funding mechanism for operations and maintenance costs of the consolidated system, the GAO report notes.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-478 (.pdf)

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