Post-Award Maintenance

Change to Processing of No Cost Extensions

The April eRA Enterprise Release included a change to how the eRA system will process No Cost Extensions. Now any No Cost Extensions made to the parent grant or any of its subprojects will automatically extend all records associated with the grant - regardless of whether the change was made via Commons or by a direct request to NIH Grants Management staff. System synchronization of these dates removes confusion and manual clean-up effort.

Post-award maintenance should include, but is not limited to, the following actions:

The PI should discuss project status with departmental administrator on a monthly basis to ensure there are funds available to support the research project.

When changes to a current project are necessary, adequate documentation of the change is collected by the department administrator and reviewed and signed-off on by thePI. Some changes require prior approval from the sponsoring agency such as:

• Change in the scope/scientific aims.
• Absence of the PI or key personnel for more than 3 months.
• Significant change/reduction in PI or key personnel effort.

Monitoring Accounts

The grant administrator should develop a grant list that captures all important grant dates and activities such as:

• Competitive Renewal
• Due dates for periodic and final scientific progress reports
• Dates for annual IRB/IACUC protocol approvals
• Other deliverables

The foundation of good management is routinely reviewing and reconciling actual charges to the Harvard general ledger. As such, it is imperative that you become familiar with Harvard systems and financial tools and run reports (listed below) no less frequently than monthly on all active accounts. Harvard systems and tools are explained in this brief presentation, Financial Tools (.ppt).

• Detail Listing
• Period Expense Report (PER)
• Invalid Coding
• Monthly Effort Reports
• GMAS custom reports

Roles and Responsibilities

Internal Policies and Procedures Regarding Non-Federal Audits

Given the recent constriction of federal dollars, we fully expect this trend to continue and would like to provide the HMS research community with some guidance with respect to audit or review inquiries you or your faculty may receive directly from non-federal sponsors.

If you are contacted by a current sponsor for an audit or if you are negotiating with a non-federal sponsor, please contact your SPA representative for more information.