NIH has issued a notice requesting input by July 28 on potential revisions to reduce administrative burdens or costs related to compliance with OMB Circular A-21, Cost Principles for Educational Institutions. For more details, read this recent blog post from NIH’s Sally Rockey.
Opportunity for Input on OMB Circular A-21
1 comment
As a NIH grantee and now especially as a department head, I am DROWNING in compliance issues.
We have campus auditors hired to ensure compliance. They are making it very difficult to get any work done.
Just this afternoon, I have had to deal with two issues:
a. Writing a scientific justification for approval of an $80 order for DVDs.
b. Being asked how to deal with someone in our Grants office disallowing an NIH supported faculty member from charging the service contract for a piece of equipment in his grant to an NIH grant. The rationale is that federal law does not allow pre-payment and until the year goes by this investigator will not be able to determine what fraction of time on the machine was spent on work related to one grant versus another. In this case he only has one grant, but they say it is possible that he could receive a future grant this year and therefore they disallow this charge for the same reason. So the idea is that he can only pay for a service contract from a federal grant at the END of the service period.
This is starting to get ridiculous. Instead of using NIH money to support science we are using substantial resources for an ever growing horde of administrative staff and auditors.