Throughout our organization's history, we have had the opportunity to serve many communities in the management of the FEMA disaster recovery grant (Public Assistance).

During our experience, we followed certain practices and procedures which enabled our clients to meet the requirements of the program and to fully fund the eligible disaster recovery costs.  We have recorded these for your use and hope they are of some benefit as you begin the recovery process.

    1.  Appoint a Director of the program - The person should be responsible to learn the program requirements and to make certain  your municipality has established the systems, procedures, and processes which will be required for public-assistance funding. The director will need to represent your government at all state and federal meetings and get the required information for processing disaster-recovery claims.  FEMA will require an authorized representative.  His name should be used as the authorized representative for your organization.

   2. Empower your Director - Provide your director with full authority to implement any and all processes required in the program.  Follow your municipality’s legal requirements in doing so.

   3.  Determine legal contracting requirements - Document the legal contracting requirements of your organization during an emergency, and adhere to them in awarding contracts for disaster recovery efforts.  Under FEMA regulations, you are responsible to follow local/state regulations and you may need to document these.

 4.  Identify and document the damages - Identify the damages and the emergency recovery efforts in effect during the storm and immediately thereafter.  Document the efforts and begin to identify the costs involved with those efforts.  If this cost exceeds small project limitations, reimbursement from FEMA is based on actual costs.  These costs must be supported by detailed documentation (contracts, time cards, project descriptions, time records of equipment used, etc.)

FEMA has provided sample documentation on its website.  Look it over, and make sure yours meets their fields of information required, and add whatever will help you track your projects.

Wherever possible, take pictures and link these to the documentation and records.  FEMA and State personnel will not possibly be able to visit every site and will probably attend to those with the highest damage priority.

 5.  Get the projects done - Once the projects are identified, determine the best means to get them completed.  You will either do them with your own resources (force account) or contract them out.  If done in house by your forces, you need to thoroughly document the effort with all the items mentioned in 4 above.  FEMA may fund these on a project by project basis and write an individual PW (Project Worksheet).  Pay particular attention to the details of this report, and whenever and wherever possible, link this to your accounting system for financial accountability.  If contracts are awarded, the individual contracts should be linked to the PW.  FEMA may not particularly be inclined to do this, because it means processing more PWs, but in the long run it will clearly establish the final cost of the reimbursement of the individual projects.  Keep copies of the contracts, and related change orders and balance these costs with the program costs as reflected in your accounting system.

 6. Establish a separate fund in your fund accounting system  for the FEMA program.

                          a. Revenue:   The source of funding will be FEMA funds, possibly some state funds if the state is participating in the disaster recovery effort, and local funds for the balance.  The FEMA website should indicate what % they are paying.  You need to know this to plan and budget your recovery effort, and to determine how much local match is required. See http://www.fema.gov/news/disasters.fema for the details of your current disaster.

                          b. Expenditures:  Payment of all bills and costs associated with the recovery effort should be processed through this fund.  This will enable you to track the actual costs, and to determine if those costs have been recognized by FEMA (a PW processed).  Payroll costs, equipment costs, other items normally processed through your general fund, should continue to be processed there.  A reimbursement check, issued to the paying fund from this  FEMA fund, should be made to track the actual costs and document the expenditure of those costs.  All relevant documentation qualifying this as a disaster-related cost should be attached as support for the reimbursement.

        c.  Work your fund budget vs. actual reports  to identify costs over budget.  Use that information to  secure the necessary funding to balance out the program and get reimbursed for all disaster-related costs.

        d.  Link the chart of accounts to the projects/PWs for better project and program monitoring.

  7.  Learn the FEMA program regulations - Become familiar with the FEMA program regulations and ask questions.  FEMA has produced these regulations for public assistance on their website - http://www.fema.gov/rrr/pa/ .  Pay particular attention to the Program Overview, Process, Performance, and Policy sections of this website.  They disclose how the program will reimburse your organization for its disaster-related expenses.

  If you have further questions, please address them to akishel@akishelcpa.com.