February 2024

Our work through the end of February and into March is focused in three areas:

1. Improving search.
2. Improving access to Tribal data.
3. Preparing for the March submission deadline.

Improving search

We added new search filters, covered in ticket #3407. These new filters allow for:

1. Searching audits by finding type.
2. Filtering by direct or passthrough funding.
3. Filtering by whether an audit is on a major program or not.

We're continuing to improve search performance and are tracking our plans in story #3388.

If you encounter issues with any of these new features, please let us know via the FAC helpdesk.

Improving access to Tribal data

We're reviewing ticket #2298. This will make Tribal data available to Federal partners via the FAC API. The team is also close to completing ticket #3331, which will make the public portion of Tribal audits appropriately visible in search.

March submission deadline

It's possible to use the FAC API to predict what is coming in March. Here are plots of the submissions-per-day to the FAC from March of 2016 through 2022.

The Clearinghouse typically sees between 700 and 900 audit submissions per day at the end of March. In 2022, the Census Bureau saw close to 2000 audits submitted in one day.

We're doing many things to prepare for this submission volume. Since our launch, we've run two "copies" of the FAC to handle submissions. This means that, if two people are uploading audits to the FAC, one might get "FAC 1," and the other "FAC 2," so they both experience good web performance. As we go into March, we are increasing that number to 10, and can double that to 20 if necessary. This way, if 10 people are uploading data at the same time, they will each experience the same level of performance.

This is possible because the FAC is built on top of technologies like cloud.gov and Login.gov.

What's next?

We're keeping our focus on March. Looking ahead to the next few months, we'll be:

• Focusing on performance improvements and growing our team’s capacity for user support.

• Providing documentation on the migration of historical and how to use it.

• Improving search to support Federal oversight work and the public’s use of FAC data.