Up next in the “Ftag of the Week” series on the CMSCG Blog is F568 Accounting and Records of Personal Funds, which is part of the Resident Rights regulatory group. If you remember our Ftag of the Week for F567 Protection/Management of Personal Funds back in 2018, you may recall how we discussed the importance of providing quarterly statements to residents. Well, this is another one of the regulations where the provision of quarterly statements is emphasized, but F568 also requires providers to use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for residents’ personal funds that have been entrusted to the facility.
The regulation has three parts to its requirements. First, facilities are responsible for establishing and maintaining a system that is based on generally accepted accounting principles to ensure a full, complete and separate accounting of residents’ personal funds that have been entrusted to the facility. GAAP means that the facility ensures that the bookkeeping in place allows the facility staff to determine, upon request, the amount of individual resident funds that are available. If the funds have been placed in an interest-bearing account, the facility should also be able to determine how much interest each individual resident’s funds have earned, based on the information last provided by the bank.
Second, the regulation requires that facilities have an accounting system in place that precludes the co-mingling of resident funds with other resident funds or any facility funds. This emphasizes the first point mentioned above – the accounting of each resident’s funds must be separate, which means the funds should also be maintained separately. Each resident’s financial record is expected to only show the transactions that involve the resident’s personal funds, including what transactions occurred and when. The facility should be providing the resident with a receipt of each transaction as well as maintaining a copy.
CMS requires that residents/ resident representatives are provided with quarterly statements, as well as upon request.
Finally, as we have mentioned before, CMS requires that residents/ resident representatives are provided with quarterly statements, as well as upon request. Quarterly statements must be provided within 30 days after the end of a quarter. Don’t forget about those statements, because it’s sure to come up on interview during your next survey. Hopefully, you also have a tracking system in place to validate that you provided the resident/resident representative with their quarterly statement. Everyone does not have a perfect memory and if the resident forgot – please have documentation that can be presented to jog their memory and prove that the statement was provided.
A citation could be avoided at F568 as well as other tags if you simply use CMS’s (Form-20063) Personal Funds Review to self-audit your compliance with the regulations referenced in the form.
