Sharpe CPA / For CPAs / Government auditing / Major program determination
Enter or import the schedule of expenditures of federal awards. It sorts the programs into Type A and Type B, takes your risk assessment of each, and works out which programs must be audited as major under 2 CFR 200.518 — with the working in an Excel workbook for the file. Free, no account needed.
Step 1
Import the client’s SEFA from Excel (.xlsx) or a CSV, paste the lines from a spreadsheet, or type them in. Each award needs its Assistance Listing number and the amount expended; name the cluster where the program belongs to one, because a cluster counts as a single program.
Copy the rows in Excel, headings included, and paste them here. Without headings, use this order: agency, Assistance Listing number, program, cluster, pass-through entity, its identifying number, expended, to subrecipients.
Your client’s figures stay on your computer. The schedule is read by this page in your browser and the workbook is written there too. Nothing is uploaded, stored or seen by anyone — which also means it is gone when you close the page, so download the workbook.
| Federal agency | ALN | Program title | Cluster | Pass-through entity | Its number | Expended | To subrecipients | Loan | Remove |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total expenditures of federal awards | |||||||||
Step 2
The year end decides which thresholds apply. Whether the auditee is low-risk decides how much of the federal money the major programs must cover: 20% if it is, 40% if it is not.
Tick each one that held for both of the two preceding audit periods. All five are needed.
Step 3
Answer for each Type A program, and assess the Type B programs it asks for. The result follows as you go.
How it decides
The calculation is the regulation’s. The risk assessments are yours, and the workbook leaves room to say why. The single audit guide has the rule in full.
Lines are grouped into programs by cluster, then by Assistance Listing number. The Type A threshold comes from the table in §200.518(b)(1) — $1,000,000 up to $34 million of awards for years beginning on or after October 1, 2024, and $750,000 up to $25 million before. A loan program over four times the largest other program is Type A and is left out of the total that sets the threshold.
Check the clusters compares every line with Part 5 of the 2025 Compliance Supplement and offers the cluster each number belongs to, so three WIOA lines are one program and not three. Identify loan programs finds the loans and loan guarantees, values each the way §200.502(b) says — new loans, plus the opening balance of earlier loans that still carry compliance requirements, plus any subsidy or allowance — and reworks the totals and the threshold.
Low-risk only if it was audited as major in one of the two most recent audits and the most recent had no material weakness, no modified opinion and no questioned costs over 5% of the program — and nothing in oversight, follow-up or changes in people or systems says otherwise. Every other Type A program is major.
Only Type B programs over 25% of the threshold are assessed, and only until one is found high-risk for every four low-risk Type A programs, rounded up. Tick the §200.519 criteria that apply and it says what they point to: high on a known control weakness, uncorrected findings or an adverse oversight review, or on two or more of the others. The conclusion is yours to change.
The major programs must take in 40% of federal awards expended, or 20% for a low-risk auditee. When they fall short it names the fewest programs that would close the gap, and you choose which to add.
It does not handle a biennial audit (§200.518(b)(4)), a program-specific audit, or a Type A program a federal agency has had OMB rule not low-risk — tick the oversight box for that one. Check the thresholds against the current regulation and the Compliance Supplement for the year you are auditing.