Standards for Financial Management Systems
Supplanting
Federal funds must be used to supplement existing State and local funds for program activities and must not supplant those funds that have been appropriated for the same purpose.
- Supplanting will be reviewed during the application process, post-award monitoring, and audit.
- If reviewers think that supplanting may have occurred, then the applicant or recipient will be required to supply documentation demonstrating that the reduction in non-Federal resources occurred for reasons other than the receipt or expected receipt of Federal funds.
- For certain programs, a written certification may be requested by the awarding agency or recipient agency stating that Federal funds will not be used to supplant State or local funds.
Example
To help clarify the difference between supplementing and supplanting, we provide the following example:
State funds are appropriated to hire 50 new police officers, and Federal funds are awarded for hiring 60 new police officers. At the end of the year, the State has hired 60 new police officers, and the Federal funds have been exhausted. The State has not used its funds towards hiring new officers, but instead reduced its appropriation for that purpose and assigned or appropriated the funds to another purpose. In this case, the State has supplanted its appropriation with the Federal funds. If supplanting had not occurred, 110 new officers would have been hired using Federal funds for 60 officers and State funds for 50 officers.
Action Item
Where the conduct of a program or one of its components is delegated to a subrecipient, the direct recipient is responsible for all aspects of the program including proper accounting and financial recordkeeping by the subrecipient. The recipient is responsible for the accounting of receipts and expenditures, cash management, maintenance of adequate financial records, and refunding of expenditures disallowed by audits.
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