Item 24 - American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Consulting Services

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Grant Thornton Public Sector LLC City of Santa Ana | RFQ 21- 093 Revised Proposal Use or disclosure of data contained on this sheet is subject to the restriction on the title page of this proposal or quotation. 29 • Inventory Price Testing – Streamlined the Inventory Price Testing process to enable teams to spend less time on manual data manipulation and more time analyzing results. • Tableau Dashboard for Financial Data – Combined spending and budget data from multiple sources, which require regular cleansing and refreshes. Developed a web browser automation tool in Python that automates the collection of financial data, performs web-scraping in support of reconciliation, and collects additional data, reducing reconciliation from 2 hours to 15 minutes. • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - convert written or typed documents into data • Robotic Process Automation – replicate the actions of a human interacting with a screen to automate repetitive, back-office processes • Equity impact tracking and mapping – Grant Thornton has developed its own method to measure and visualize the impact of projects towards progressing a client’s goals for promoting growth of equity and diversity. Grant Thornton’s algorithm can be deployed proactively to objectively estimate the equitable impact of a project via change in in the area’s equity index score. In our engagement with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) (2014-2018) - CMS, Office of Financial Management, Grant Thornton conducted an internal control assessment of CMS Central Office, Regional Offices, Medicare Contractors, Data Centers (including twenty financial applications), and Shared System Maintainers. As part of this assessment Grant Thornton designed and tested approximately 75 controls in the CMS’s Marketplace cycle in such areas as 1) Eligibility and enrollment of individuals; 2) Vendor Management (review and approval of issuer payee groups for payment); 3) Payment approval of APTCs and advance CSRs, and collection of FFM user fees; 4) Reconciliation of CSR and APTC payments; and 5) Oversight of reinsurance, risk adjustment and risk corridors (premium stabilization programs). These assessments were a critical step in communicating current status to CMS’s stakeholders, particularly the IRS who holds the subsidy appropriation (APTC and CSR) for Marketplace. The Grant Thornton Team will coordinate closely with the City’s Project Manager, and associated staff, to select, customize, and scale our solutions and tools to best integrate with the City’s financial systems to efficiently extract, analyze, and synthesize the data and information needed to assist the City in mitigating programmatic or compliance risks and completing ARPA reports. 2.4.5 Provide assistance to City staff with preparation of audits As discussed in Section 2.4.1, audit readiness is a governance theme that drives all four phases of our team’s approach to comprehensive grants management. Throughout each phase of the project’s lifecycle our team will create the documentation necessary to demonstrate compliance with the latest SLFRF guidance and federal uniform guidance requirements. Our team will work diligently throughout the first three phases of our approach to not only collect necessary data for reporting eligible expenditures, but will also create documents to contemporaneously memorialize critical procurement and methodological decisions and practices to align those actions to the existing compliance and programmatic guidance requirements. At the closeout phase of a project, our team will compile all supporting documents, determinations, and reports into one comprehensive and organized package to facilitate efficient reviews by programmatic and outside auditors. The closeout phase of each project will be guided by our Public Audit Subject Matter Expert, Rachel Stushek, to enable our team the opportunity to create comprehensive support documentation packages and reports to demonstrate full compliance with federal uniform guidance principles. Grant Thornton will assist the City of Santa Ana in responding to questions from their independent single auditor specific to compliance matters and determination on eligibility, procurement methods, and ARPA reporting and will also support the City departments to prepare responses to audit findings. Grant Thornton’s audit specialists work in tandem with our Public Sector Risk Advisory team to remain abreast of relevant policy changes in real-time, thereby enhancing the audit support we provide. Combining audit expertise with our compliance approach provides an audit preparation strategy which is uniquely well suited to the City of Santa Ana’s needs.