Grantees

Remove Administrative Components from Progress Reporting

The RPPR continues to evolve into more financial and administrative reporting than it has to do with scientific/technical progress ever since you eliminated annual FFR's for SNAP grants. Institutions are getting hammered on follow-up questioning from Grants Mgmt Specialists regarding unobligated balances, effort reported on the participants tab, other support, use of IDP's and MyNCBI noncompliant pubs. Many followup questions simply occur because there is no opportunity to provide further explanations on the report. Do you think a PI actually sits and reads all of the progress report instructions or knows how to report CM effort for individuals over 1 CM? Is there really a need to provide a budget on non-SNAP grants if there are no significant deviations from the original proposal? What I'm getting at is let the PI's do what they know how how to do and that is to provide their actual progress just like they do in a final progress report. How many different ways do you need to see Effort reporting? Let's get more to comparing how does salary charged compare to salary requested in the budget. Quite honestly, it would be easier to supply you with an annual expenditure report based on the expense categories in our budget request on an annual basis after the budget period ends. Issue the NGA for the recommended support and evaluate if adjustments are needed after reviewing the expenditure report.

 

Then we have the dreaded fear of having an unobligated balance > 25%. Sometimes explaining that we got a late start or had problems hiring a postdoc just doesn't suffice. How about this? As long as our unobligated balance doesn't exceed the equivalent of one year's budget let us carry it forward into a possible NCE year which by current rule s/b automatic if requested to complete the goals . Judge progress by actual progress and not $ spent. Sometimes when we have that late start in year 1 due to getting IRB approvals we will always be behind and we explain we'll probably need an NCE at the end. No, that's not good enough! We have to provide a restructure budget and timeline for the remainder of the project which now includes a NCE budget year which happens to be utilizing carryover funds.

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Idea No. 41