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Cities and counties can incur millions of dollars in disaster response and recovery costs. Although FEMA reimburses most of these, if cost and time expenditures aren’t properly recorded localities may be denied assistance or forced to return money years after the disaster hits.

While local leaders are not directly responsible for documenting disaster expenses, it’s important that you work with your emergency manager to have a plan in place for mundane yet crucial tasks such as payroll accounting during a natural disaster. Follow these tips to ensure time and cost expenditures obtained before, during and after a disaster are properly documented in your locality.

Designate at least one person to document disaster costs.  

• Work with your emergency manager to designate someone from your municipal accounting and finance department to fill this roll during a disaster. Ideally, you should designate and train this person before a disaster hits.
• If your municipality has the capacity, consider appointing a disaster financial manager to your emergency operations team.
• Station the person responsible for documenting payroll n the emergency operations center (EOC), where they can quickly receive direction from the emergency  manager and gather information from other team members.

Advise emergency management to begin keeping payroll records as soon as the possibility of a natural disaster becomes apparent.

• Activities performed before a disaster even makes landfall can be eligible for reimbursement. These include tasks like going door-to-door to evacuate residents, sandbagging, shelter setup and any other task tied directly to the event.
• Even if the presidential disaster declaration is not made pre-landfall, keeping detailed payroll records of activities that occur before the declaration can maximize the reimbursement funds you receive and support your state’s request for a presidential disaster declaration.

Be ready with multiple payroll tracking methods.

• IBTS suggests using the WH-347 form — a standardized fillable PDF payroll form recognized by every federal agency — to track disaster related costs.
• Make sure that the person responsible for disaster payroll accounting downloads and saves a copy of the form to multiple computers before an event. This way it’s available even if there is no internet access.
• Ensure your financial manager also has printed copies stored in a protected location so they are available in the event that computer access is limited. Stay informed of where these are in case the designated financial manager is unable to perform their role and someone else must step in.

 Maintain records for at least 10 years following a disaster.

• FEMA can request an audit five to eight, and sometimes even ten years after a disaster hits. If documentation is unavailable, incomplete or incorrect, FEMA may force you to repay the funding you received.
• While FEMA only requires that documents be maintained for five years, through experience and as an extra precaution, IBTS recommends keeping documents for 10 years.