I'm trying to separate policy from hearsay and come up with some "truths" about electronic submission deadlines.  I want to be able to answer the question: "When will my application be rejected because it is too late?"

NIH recently issued an updated policy:  Late Submission of Grant Applications, NOT-OD-06-086, August 11, 2006
"For applications that are required to use electronic submission this requires successful submission to Grants.gov by 5 p.m. local time on the date indicated."

Sounds simple...but..we know from http://era.nih.gov/ElectronicReceipt/submit_app.htm   that
"NIH is providing some flexibility for the first submission dates of a transitioned mechanism by allowing applicant institutions to submit changed/corrected applications in the week following the submission deadline as long as the changes are to address errors encountered during the eRA Commons validation process. If the one week correction window is used, the applicant must include a cover letter with an explanation for why the application is late."
AND..."Eventually, NIH will require that an on time submission will mean that a �clean� application (i.e., no Grants.gov or NIH errors) be submitted to Grants.gov by the application deadline."
http://era.nih.gov/ElectronicReceipt/faq_submission.htm

Questions:
1) Is this all we know?
2) When does the "one week correction window" (e.g. for R21s) end?  What does "eventually" mean?
3) Suppose you successfully submit to Gg just before the deadline, and there are no NIH validation errors.  It is now 2 days after the deadline and the PI discovers some wildly crazy mistake on page 8 of the research plan that was not caused by NIH.   If you want to really follow the rules, do you just let it go, wait for IRG assignment, and ask the SRA to accept a correction version?
3) Has anyone out there had a proposal rejected by NIH for being late?

======================================================================
 Instructions on how to use the RESADM-L Mailing List, including
 subscription information and a web-searchable archive, are available
 via our web site at http://www.hrinet.org (click on "Listserv Lists")
======================================================================