PIs at Princeton University spend a large amount of their time during proposal preparation on compliance approvals. One recommendation would be for the federal government to impose a pre-compliance standard at submission, which could include a document from the sponsored research office listing areas where they know that strict compliance has not been met. The compliance can then be fully implemented once/if the proposal ...more »
The government should make efforts to reduce focus on the micro accounting of grant expenditures and move towards a system where the peer review process and program managers base future funding decisions on broader measures of appropriate expenditures of cost. Princeton University suggests that one useful guide might be the IRS rules: in general, any expenditure that would normally be considered taxable income (apart ...more »
OMB should clarify the parameters for the risk analyses that universities are required to make for their subrecipients under the Uniform Guidance. Such a move would help to curtail the proliferation of individualized standards or action plans established by individual universities seeking to carry out their responsibilities under the as prime recipients with respect to their subrecipients.
A single, central reporting portal for all reporting would help achieve the goals of the DATA Act. A central portal should provide the following functions: 1) One Portal a. The goal is to have one place for recipients to report on research expenditures. b. All the agencies conform from the beginning. i. If exceptions are granted, it should be clearly documented who has been granted an exception and, the length of time ...more »
Enactment of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act in May, 2014 provides many opportunities for the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Treasury to improve the public transparency of Federal spending while simultaneously reducing the overall reporting burden on both Principal Investigators and institutional Research Administrators. However, there are also many implementation scenarios that ...more »
Change UG to Allow 120 Days for all Final Reporting (Financial and Programmatic) for all agencies Currently the Uniform Guidance (UG) requires that all financial & programmatic reports are submitted to the sponsor within 90 days after end date. Several agencies, through coordination with the FDP (Federal Demonstration Partnership) and COGR, are adjusting their deadlines to 120 days after end-date. These agencies, most ...more »
Effort Reporting should be incorporated into the progress reports. some sponsors want person months and descriptions of person(s) tasks.
The requirement to list PubMed Central ID #s is a HUGE time and effort burden for research administrators. That is the #1 requirement I would change. There must be other ways to track compliance with the Public Access Policy.
For each person paid from the grant who worked >160 hours (1 person month) during the grant year, there must be a Commons ID (including the completion of Personal Profile Information). There also needs to be information about the total number of hours each person worked on the grant during grant year so that person months can be calculated. This information is required for undergraduate who may be paid hourly as student ...more »
Government understandably wants to data-mine progress reports. The loss of Fastlane reporting, with its PDF structure, in exchange for plain text/fillable fields in Research.gov, is an example of this. However, the reporting format in Research.gov is ridiculously time-consuming. It has generated an extreme, labor-intensive, administrative burden. Not one Principle Investigator I know wants anything to do with Research.gov, ...more »
The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requires federal service contractors to report their direct labor hours and amounts invoiced to the government. This mandate is intended to help federal agencies fulfill their annual requirement to submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an inventory of activities performed by service contractors, in order to help determine whether agencies have the right balance of ...more »
The grant period usually does not match with the term of a graduate student or a post-doc exactly. Therefore, if one allows institution to approve the budget re-allocation between graduate students and post-docs, instead of seeking approval from funding agency, that will make research go more smoothly based on the need of individual project.