The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Division of Payment Management uses a custom-developed Payment Management System (PMS) that provides federal awarding agencies and state grant recipients the tools to manage grant payment requests, and disbursement reporting activities. It is a full service centralized grants payment and cash management system.
The system is fully automated to receive payment requests, edit them for accuracy and content, transmit the payment to either the Federal Reserve Bank or the U.S. Treasury for deposit into the State’s bank account, and record the payment transactions and corresponding disbursements to the appropriate account(s) in PMS. In order to receive funds through PMS, each agency is required to register their Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) number and the State’s Tax Identification Number (TIN) with the System for Award Management (SAM).
For most accounts, OSC BSAO initiates payment requests based on the project’s accounts receivable balance in SFS. For those state agencies that must receive permission to draw funds prior to submitting an actual drawdown request, OSC BSAO will draw funds after the agency receives permission and subsequently notifies OSC BSAO that funds can be drawn. Payment requests are approved or rejected automatically based on the amount of available funds in non-expired status in the PMS account. For any awards that have passed their 90-day liquidation date, the payment request is put on hold until the federal program office either approves or rejects the request. Approved requests are then paid to the State the next business day via the ACH system. Rejected requests are deleted from the federal draw system. For rejected requests, OSC BSAO will contact agency staff and request that the rejected charges be moved to another funding source and instruct agencies that no additional costs should be charged to this project unless the federal agency approves an award date extension.
The PMS also provides a feature to make adjustments between grants. Funds can be returned via PMS provided the total amount of other grants within the same Payee Account Number (PAN) that are being drawn is at least one dollar greater than the amount being returned.
Federal Financial Reports (FFR)
In addition to federal drawdowns, PMS is used for submission of quarterly FFRs (Federal Cash Transaction Report (FCTR) and the SF-425. These reports summarize drawdown and disbursement activity for each account. They are used by HHS to monitor the amount of cash that has been drawn but not yet disbursed. Failure to submit the report within thirty days following the end of the quarter will result in the account being frozen, thereby preventing any additional drawdowns from being processed until the report is filed.
For HHS Grant Recipients Only: Effective 4/1/2022, HHS grant recipients are no longer required to submit quarterly cash transaction reports (aka Federal Cash Transaction Report (FCTR) 30 calendar days after the end of each calendar quarter. PMS will pre-populate the cash transaction section (lines 10a through 10c) of the FFR using recipient real-time cash receipts (drawdowns, refunds, and journal vouchers) information from PMS and adjust recipient-reported disbursements to equal cash receipts on all non-closed sub-accounts (PMS type P). Recipients will be required to certify at the time of each drawdown request whether the cash drawdown request is for reimbursement of actual expenditures or is an advance for immediate disbursement. At the time of each drawdown request, recipients must assert that award funds are used in compliance with all award conditions and federal statutory requirements. These changes do not impact the standard reporting requirements and deadlines for financial expenditure data, submitted in the SF-425, unless otherwise noted in the Notice of Award.
Access to PMS
To obtain access to PMS:
- Go to Payment Management System Web Site: https://pms.psc.gov
- Select “Request Access”
- Select “Create New User”
- Select “Grantee/Recipient” from the User Type dropdown menu
- Complete information on the screen
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Guide to Financial Operations
REV. 09/19/2022