The Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act of 2019 was signed into law on December 30, 2019, after receiving strong bipartisan support in Congress.
Grant recipients have long been burdened with reporting requirements that vary with each agency and that force recipients to submit the same data over and over to multiple agencies for multiple grants. The GREAT Act addresses those burdens by requiring the development of Government-wide data standards for common recipient reporting data elements. The GREAT ACT also requires that recipient-reported data be stored in searchable and machine-readable form so data can be submitted once and accessed many times across government. These requirements apply to audit-related information as well.
The GREAT Act also requires that all recipient-reported data be published on a single public portal (subject to restrictions on the release of sensitive data) and that all Federal award information be available as a single government-wide data set to facilitate public access for research into program effectiveness and other purposes.
The government is required to establish data standards (through a consultative process with stakeholders) within one year. The government must issue guidelines to agencies directing the use of the new standards within three years, and agencies will have one year after guidance is issued to implement the standards for new and existing recipient reporting requirements. The government-wide data set must be available within five years.
To read the GREAT Act, please go to https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/150/text.
