“The Treasury Department continues to test a blockchain proof of concept tokenizing grant payments to increase transparency and reduce the amount of reporting recipients must do, the program’s lead said Monday.
Through the pilot program, data on the award amount, key dates and recipient is scraped from National Science Foundation-issued grant letters and meshed with payment information inside a blockchain token for real-time, transactional transparency…”
“FS pays grant recipients using their banking number, so it knows who was paid. But what happens to the money after is harder to track — increasing the reporting burden on NSF- and Department of Health and Human Services-funded researchers…”
“BFS built its proof of concept off NSF’s Award Cash Management $ervice (ACM$), a grant payment drawdown system, and it hopes to expand to HHS given the volume of grants awarded by that agency, Fischer said.
His agency is already working with the grants quality services management office (QSMO) inside HHS, which is standing up a marketplace of cloud-based systems and services from federal shared service providers like BFS for customer agencies. The Federal Demonstration Partnership is another customer, as is the Department of Commerce in the past, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is an ‘important’ partner setting standards around blockchain, Fischer said…” Read the full article here.
Source: Treasury advances blockchain proof of concept for grant payments – By Dave Nyczepir, November 9, 2021. FedScoop.
