Suppressing salaries in NSF budgets Farnsworth, Franci 05 Aug 2005 14:53 EST

Hello,
The FastLane Helpdesk wasn't much help and the program officer was cynical, so I'm turning to the best resource I know:

Per the GPG, NSF allows institutions to omit salary detail on NSF budgets (instead submitting this detail in the "Single Copy Documents" section).      We have a proposal going in with 3 co-PI's who do not want to be privy to each other's salary information.     They would like to have the NSF budget show only the aggregate salaries for all three of them and provide the necessary detail in a separate document for the program officer and NSF files.     And that seems to be allowed under the GPG.  The Budget Justification would provide detail about their individual efforts, but no salary info.

However, I can't figure out how to over ride the way the FastLane budget is supposed to work.   The FastLane Helpdesk first said to call the program officer, but when pressed told me to upload the budget as a Single Copy Document and to manually enter the total on the Cover Page (which I'm not sure I can do).   That doesn't satisfy the need to have the rest of the budget loaded into FastLane.  Presumably reviewers will want to see the full NSF budget.

A program officer said to call FastLane!    And then he said to enter the information into the FastLane budget as "three childish PI's" but more importantly, he said that he had never seen a budget (in 4 years at NSF) that showed aggregate salaries only.      In talking with him, it seems like we could list the 3 PI's on the budget with no person months or salary request and create another non-co-PI "senior personnel" line labelled Aggregate Salaries (although we probably would need a Current & Pending form for that "person" as well!).

If you have ever done this, please reply to me directly with advice.       Based on the attitude of the program officer, I will suggest to these faculty members that they should "grow up" (his words) and either avoid looking at the NSF budget forms or live with the knowledge of each other's salarie.    But is there a "proper: way to have the NSF budget form show only the aggregate senior personnel salaries?  Is it adviseable?

Thanks, as always.

Franci Farnsworth
Email:  xxxxxx@middlebury.edu

Frances Vinal Farnsworth
Coordinator of Sponsored Research
Library Room 223
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

Tel:  802-443-5889
Fax:  802-443-2081

Web:  http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/grants/

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