The Process:

At Stephen F. Austin State University, a comprehensive university with an
enrollment of 12,500, all proposals to foundations and corporations that
have a specified budget, documenting an expenditure plan for the funds, are
suppose to (and most do) go through the Office of Research and Sponsored
Programs prior to submission.  Our office contends that any proposal that
contains a specified budget represents an obligation to expend funds as set
forth in the budget.

Advancement would want me to say that they too have an obligation to use
funds as they have set forth in a request, the difference is whether the
funds are ongoing (endowments) or the funds are pooled with other funds to
support a specific activity.  Advancement offices do have an obligation to
use funds as they have set forth, but the funds are not tied to individual
budgetary lines, which is what our office works with.  If the request is
for a lump of funds which will be pooled with other funds to support
equipment acquisition, building renovation, or operating expenses, we
'typically' are not involved in the review or direct tracking of the funds.
If federal funds were a component of the effort we would review and track
the use of those funds and any matching requirement obligation, but not the
funds received as general support for the effort from various private,
corporate, and industrial donors nor the proposals/efforts that generated
them.

After we have reviewed a proposal to a foundation of corporation, it is
then routed on to Advancement and then to the VP for Academic Affairs and
the President (the University's designated signature authority).
Advancement reviews the proposal to ensure that we are not stepping on
someone else project that is already in the works.  We ask that faculty
clear all planned proposal with Advancement prior to beginning the
development of the proposal, this works most of the time, but not all of
the time.

For the most part the system works well, problems occasionally arise when
someone goes to advancement first and the proposal does not get back to us,
but we also periodically have problems with proposals going straight to the
president without any form of review.

Accounting:

We document costsharing on indirect cost on private funds which have been
reviewed by our office just as we do on state or federal projects.  The
projects are set up with budgetary account numbers designating them as
grants/contracts.

Financial Reports:

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs prepares reports relating to
research expenditures (state and NSF) which encompass all sources of funds
that support research activities.  The Office also prepares the reports for
the University Factbook.  We prepare two sets of Factbook reports, one
which encompasses all forms of support for research and sponsored program
activities and one which documents only contract and grant expenditures,
which is a subset of the all forms report.  It is possible if Advancement
was completely aware that they are not contributing information to the
University Factbook, a conflict would arise, but to date the issue had not
been raised.

The Office of University Advancement prepares annual report (I believe it
goes to CASE) which documents all sources of external funding for all types
of activities, with the exception of state and federal support.

While all of this involves some duplicate reporting, the reports clearly
state that they are for different types of activities and sources of funds
and none of the reports are duplicated within the same document.

So far no one has had a problem with this.  Our relationship with
Advancement leaves some to be desired, but actually pinpointing the cause
for this is fairly complex and not completely clear.

__________________________________________________
Kris E. Rhodes
Coordinator, Research and Sponsored Programs
Stephen F. Austin State University
Box 13024 SFA
Nacogdoches, TX 75962
Phone 409/468-3971, Fax 409/468-1251
xxxxxx@sfasu.edu