Re: Collaborator purchasing supplies for subcontractor to avoid F&A Barbara Gray 13 Apr 2009 13:04 EST
I've had requests to do this with travel and generally don't agree to it. Travel usually takes signatures of the individuals who are traveling and I don't want our faculty having to learn to navigate the travel authorization and approval process of another institution or to wait for inordinately long periods of time before getting reimbursed. If I were on the awarding end, I would want to put their travel funds in the subgrantee's budget, as our procedures for paying travel for non-employees are considered procurements and have about three times the amount of paperwork. The PI would go from no paperwork to a burdensome process if we didn't insist on the travel funds flowing down. How much additional work will it take your PI/Institution to get the supplies you need through the prime? Also, is there a critical turn-around time that may be jeopardized by having a "go-between?"If there will be one or two major purchasing events, it may be reasonably efficient. But if you need to make a lot of small purchases over the life of the award, you may spend more administrative time making that happen than if you could purchase on your own. If you end up spending that extra time and don't get the indirect to cover the cost of that work, I would say that it is not in the best interests of your institution to agree to this. Ms. Barbara H. Gray Director of Grants & Contracts Valdosta State University 1500 North Patterson Street Valdosta, GA 31698-0429 Telephone: 229-333-7837 Fax: 229-245-3853 Email: xxxxxx@valdosta.edu -----Original Message----- From: Research Administration List [mailto:xxxxxx@hrinet.org] On Behalf Of Schmitt, Andrea L Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 12:26 PM To: xxxxxx@hrinet.org Subject: [RESADM-L] Collaborator purchasing supplies for subcontractor to avoid F&A Good morning everyone. I'm Looking for opinions on this, please help. I was asked to remove the supplies from our subaward proposal budget submitted to a university. Their sponsored projects office said they will put our supplies in their budget and have it shipped to us, thus using their lower F&A rate. This doesn't make sense to me, if we are using the supplies, we should purchase them. I know they are trying to avoid the extra F&A since the challenge grants limit total costs to $500,000. Is this an acceptable practice? Do you think their sponsored projects office really suggested this? I wonder if any of them are on this listserv. Does anyone else suggest this practice to their PI's? I have to admit I'm also a bit peeved, I just finished submitting everything, I have 17 other ARRA grants to work on and I don't' have time to change their budget, Ugh. Thanks Andrea ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Andrea Schmitt Grants Manager Sun Health Research Institute 10515 West Santa Fe Dr. Sun City, AZ 85351 623-876-5628 623-876-5461 (fax) xxxxxx@bannerhealth.com ====================================================================== 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") ====================================================================== ====================================================================== 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") ======================================================================