All,

At the past week's NIH regional conference, I heard NIH tell us that any trainee (postdoc or grad student) who receives a stipend instead of a salary should NOT be charged to NIH R01 grants.  Before we discontinue this practice at our institute, I thought I'd check with each of you to see what is actually done in practice.

We do what I suspect many of you do:  treat postdocs on a fellowship as "non-employees receiving stipends" while treating postdocs paid from institutional funds as "employees receiving a salary."  This ensures that the former can be paid from fellowship awards (most of which prohibit an employee-employer relationship) while the latter can be paid from R01 awards (which REQUIRE an employer/employee relationship, according to my interpretation of A-122 Paragraph 7a and 53, each of which use the word "employee").  Even though this drives our legal staff crazy, knowing that two groups of people who are doing the exact same thing (training) are treated differently from an employment perspective, we've persevered anyhow, under the assumption that is how many other universities/institutes do this.

Do any of you have a different take?  Or treat your trainees differently from us?

As always, thanks in advance for your responses.

Pat Kaufman
Director of Finance
Stowers Institute for Medical Research
Kansas City, MO
816-926-4027    xxxxxx@stowers-institute.org

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