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GSA's Federal Audit Clearinghouse
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Validation: Improve finding reference controls in `findings` workbook #3948

Open jadudm opened 1 month ago

jadudm commented 1 month ago

Consider the following:

award_reference reference_number type_requirement is_modified_opinion is_other_findings is_material_weakness is_significant_deficiency is_other_matters is_questioned_costs is_repeat_finding prior_finding_ref_numbers
AWARD-0003 2023-001 L N N Y N N N Y 2022-001
AWARD-0003 2023-002 L N N Y N N N Y 2022-001
AWARD-0004 2023-001 L N N N Y N N N N/A

Award 3 has findings reference 1 and 2. This is good.

Award 4 has finding reference 1. This is appropriate; a single finding can apply to multiple awards.

What does not make sense is that the auditor findings are different for row 1 and row 3. That is, finding reference 2023-001 is being described in two different ways. In the case of finding 001, is_material_weakness is both Y and N.

This can be seen in report 2023-05-GSAFAC-0000027356.

Validation improvement

Our data validation on this sheet should ensure that a given finding reference (e.g. 2023-001) has the same values in every instance.

For error reporting, we should report the first instance we find (in this case, row 1), and report each deviance as a separate error. So, we would expect one error to be reported back in this case, for row three. Something akin to:

On row 1, you reported 2023-001 as ..., and on row 3, you reported it as .... The FAC cannot accept one finding reference with different <insert word...>
### Tasks
- [ ] Determine correct language for the properties associated with a finding reference.
- [ ] Implement validation
- [ ] Add a findings sheet to `should pass` and `should fail` in the test suite
- [ ] Document this change as part of the next monthly update