CMMC readiness that gets you assessment-ready, not just hopeful.

CMMC stands for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, the Department of Defense program that verifies whether a contractor protects sensitive government information the way its contracts require. The current version, CMMC 2.0, sorts contractors into three levels based on the type of data they touch, then checks their cybersecurity against established federal standards. Once the program is fully written into contracts, your CMMC status becomes a condition of award, not a nice-to-have.

Two kinds of information drive the whole model. Federal Contract Information (FCI) is information provided by or generated for the government under a contract that is not meant for public release. Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is more sensitive — technical drawings, specifications, and other data the government marks for protection. Handle only FCI and you sit at Level 1. Handle CUI and you move to Level 2 or Level 3, where the bar rises sharply.

Readiness is everything that happens before the official assessment. It is the gap analysis, the documentation, and the remediation that turn "we think we are compliant" into "we can prove it, control by control." FinAudit CPA does this readiness work. We measure you honestly, tell you where you fall short, help you fix it, and prepare the evidence an assessor will demand. The certification decision itself belongs to an authorized assessor, and we are candid about that line throughout.

If your revenue touches the Department of Defense, CMMC will reach you. That includes prime contractors, but it reaches much further down. The Defense Industrial Base is a long supply chain, and the requirement flows to the subcontractors, manufacturers, and service providers who handle FCI or CUI on the prime's behalf. If a drawing, a specification, or a government data file lands in your systems, you are in scope.

Three moments tend to force the issue:

• A solicitation names a CMMC level. The RFP lists a required level as a condition of award, and you cannot bid credibly without a plan to meet it.
• A prime flows the requirement down. Your customer has to prove its whole supply chain protects CUI, so it asks you to demonstrate your own status before it will keep placing orders.
• You are renewing or expanding defense work. Contracts you have held for years start carrying clauses that were not there before, and self-attestation alone no longer clears the bar.

Start earlier than feels necessary. Remediation is the slow part — building controls, running them long enough to gather evidence, and closing items on your Plan of Action and Milestones takes months, not weeks. The contractors who scramble are the ones who waited for the assessment date to appear before looking at their own environment.

You receive a complete readiness package: a scored gap assessment against your required level, a System Security Plan that describes your real environment rather than an idealized one, a Plan of Action and Milestones that tracks every open control to a closure date, and remediation guidance that turns findings into fixes. We finish with a mock assessment so you walk into the real thing already knowing how it will go.

Timing depends almost entirely on your starting point. A contractor with mature IT and only documentation gaps can be assessment-ready in a couple of months. A contractor standing up CUI protection for the first time should plan on 6 to 12 months, because some controls have to operate long enough to produce evidence, and POA&M items take real work to close. We build the schedule around your contract deadlines and tell you early if a target date is unrealistic, rather than letting you find out at the assessment.

Let us be precise about our role, because it matters. FinAudit CPA provides CMMC readiness — gap assessment, documentation, and remediation support. We are not an authorized C3PAO, and we do not issue CMMC certifications. That separation is deliberate and, in many cases, useful: the firm that prepares you and the firm that certifies you are meant to be different sets of eyes, and keeping them distinct protects the credibility of your result.

What you get from us is an assessor's mindset applied to your side of the table. As a licensed US CPA firm, we spend our days building evidence that survives independent scrutiny, which is exactly what a CMMC assessment demands. We score you honestly against NIST 800-171, we write a System Security Plan that will not embarrass you when an assessor reads it line by line, and we map your controls once so the same work supports ISO 27001 or a SOC 2 examination later. You also get senior attention, a fixed scope you can budget around, and a team that tells you the uncomfortable truth about a gap while there is still time to fix it.