Protect our Land, Ascend with Us!

Ascension seeks an experienced Financial/Audit Subject Matter Expert to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Grant Programs Directorate in strengthening financial oversight, grant accountability, internal controls, audit readiness, and compliance across complex federal grant programs.

The ideal candidate is a financial management, audit, or grants-compliance professional who can examine financial and programmatic information, recognize emerging risks, evaluate whether controls are working as intended, and translate technical findings into practical recommendations for FEMA leadership and program stakeholders.

Contractor Role Summary

The Financial/Audit SME supports FEMA’s oversight of grant-related financial activity and program performance. The position evaluates financial data, expenditure trends, payment requests, compliance documentation, audit findings, and internal-control processes to help FEMA identify risk, confirm allowability and reasonableness, and take corrective action when necessary.

The requirements associate this labor category with:

• Performance and risk documentation.
• Programmatic and financial monitoring.
• GAO and Inspector General audit responses.
• Compliance analysis.
• Analysis of payment requests.
• Financial-data compilation.
• Burn-rate and expenditure analysis.
• Financial analysis and reporting.
• Audit findings, internal controls, and financial-process improvement.

The individual must be capable of working across multiple assignments with changing priorities and incomplete or evolving information. Successful performance requires a disciplined, evidence-based approach to analysis, strong documentation practices, and the ability to distinguish routine variances from conditions that may represent questioned costs, control deficiencies, noncompliance, or elevated program risk.

The SME is expected to help FEMA personnel use reliable financial information, documented methodologies, standardized review tools, and practical control processes to make timely and defensible decisions.

Anticipated Day-to-Day Responsibilities

• Analyze grant-related financial, programmatic, performance, and risk information to identify trends, anomalies, control weaknesses, and areas requiring additional review.
• Review payment requests, supporting documentation, expenditure records, and other financial submissions for completeness, consistency, allowability, reasonableness, and alignment with applicable requirements.
• Compile financial information from multiple sources into organized datasets, monitoring tools, briefing materials, and management reports.
• Calculate and monitor obligation, expenditure, disbursement, and burn rates against approved budgets, funding periods, milestones, and expected program performance.
• Identify unusual spending patterns, delayed expenditures, accelerated drawdowns, unsupported costs, budget variances, and other indicators of potential financial or programmatic risk.
• Assess the design and operating effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting, payment review, monitoring, documentation, and corrective-action processes.
• Document risks, findings, conclusions, supporting evidence, and recommended actions in a clear and auditable format.
• Evaluate compliance with applicable statutes, regulations, award terms, FEMA policies, financial-management requirements, and grant-administration procedures.
• Support FEMA responses to GAO, Office of Inspector General, independent auditor, and other oversight-body inquiries, findings, recommendations, and information requests.
• Develop audit-response packages, management comments, corrective-action plans, finding-resolution trackers, evidence matrices, and supporting documentation.
• Track open audit findings, questioned costs, corrective actions, responsible parties, target dates, evidence submissions, and closure status.
• Reconcile discrepancies among financial systems, program records, payment documentation, monitoring reports, and recipient or subrecipient submissions.
• Perform root-cause analyses to determine why financial-control, compliance, reporting, or process failures occurred.
• Recommend corrective actions, compensating controls, monitoring procedures, process improvements, and risk-mitigation strategies.
• Prepare financial analyses, decision memoranda, executive summaries, dashboards, presentations, and recurring or ad hoc reports.
• Brief FEMA leadership, program officials, grants-management personnel, financial staff, auditors, and other stakeholders on findings, risks, and recommended actions.
• Coordinate with grants-management specialists, program analysts, data analysts, project managers, and Government personnel to validate assumptions and resolve discrepancies.
• Develop standardized templates, checklists, review protocols, standard operating procedures, risk-control matrices, and monitoring tools.
• Maintain complete, accurate, version-controlled workpapers and supporting documentation sufficient to demonstrate how conclusions were reached.
• Protect sensitive financial, grant, recipient, subrecipient, and personally identifiable information in accordance with FEMA and DHS requirements.
• Participate in meetings, monitoring reviews, audit-readiness sessions, risk discussions, and corrective-action working groups.
• Respond to urgent Government requests and competing priorities while maintaining the accuracy and defensibility of analyses.
• Apply approved quality-control procedures before submitting reports, recommendations, workpapers, or other deliverables.