The 14 accounting-system criteria a DCAA auditor checks before a cost-reimbursable award, straight from the program they follow. Tick what you already have to see where you stand.
Audit Program 17740 is the internal playbook a DCAA auditor follows to run a pre-award review of your accounting system. Its full title is the Preaward Survey of Prospective Contractor Accounting System, and it is published on dcaa.mil. The program walks the auditor through the criteria on Standard Form 1408 (SF-1408), one at a time, to judge whether the design of your system is acceptable for a cost-reimbursable award.
Two things are worth keeping separate: 17740 is the auditor's program, and SF-1408 is the form and the criteria. This is a review of design, not of actual spending. The program states that transaction testing is not required, and that a walkthrough of the system is ordinarily enough to evaluate the design.
How WiseCost helps. WiseCost adds the DCAA-compliant layer on top of QuickBooks Online: compliant timekeeping and labor distribution, indirect rate calculation, allocation of indirect cost to contracts, and contract-level cost visibility, with an immutable audit trail. That is the design an SF-1408 review is looking for.
Source: DCAA Master Audit Program, Activity Code 17740, Preaward Survey of Prospective Contractor Accounting System (Version 9.0, Jan 2023), and Standard Form 1408, Section II. Both are public at dcaa.mil. This resource is educational and is not a substitute for the official forms or a review by your CPA.