Reporting and DATA Act Open Dialogue Ideas

The FAR requires semi-annual submission of Individual Subcontract Reports (ISRs) for all federal agencies, as well as Summary Subcontract Reports (SSRs) for DoD and NASA, and annual submission of SSRs for civilian agencies. In addition to the submissions required during performance of a covered contract, ISRs are required to be submitted within 30 days of contract completion. Amending the FAR, at a minimum, and the ...more »

AAU, COGR, and APLU recommend that OMB require all Federal agencies subject to OSTP’s 2013 policy memorandum, “Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research,” to harmonize the procedures by which extramural grantees submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts or final published documents and data to the agencies’ public access repositories. We believe that this harmonization process may most effectively ...more »

The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requires federal service contractors to report their direct labor hours and amounts invoiced to the government. This mandate is intended to help federal agencies fulfill their annual requirement to submit to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) an inventory of activities performed by service contractors, in order to help determine whether agencies have the right balance of ...more »

Government understandably wants to data-mine progress reports. The loss of Fastlane reporting, with its PDF structure, in exchange for plain text/fillable fields in Research.gov, is an example of this. However, the reporting format in Research.gov is ridiculously time-consuming. It has generated an extreme, labor-intensive, administrative burden. Not one Principle Investigator I know wants anything to do with Research.gov, ...more »

I spend more time figuring out what I have to report than actually reporting it. If the process could be streamlined with fillable forms, this would make it much easier!

For each person paid from the grant who worked >160 hours (1 person month) during the grant year, there must be a Commons ID (including the completion of Personal Profile Information). There also needs to be information about the total number of hours each person worked on the grant during grant year so that person months can be calculated. This information is required for undergraduate who may be paid hourly as student ...more »

Change UG to Allow 120 Days for all Final Reporting (Financial and Programmatic) for all agencies Currently the Uniform Guidance (UG) requires that all financial & programmatic reports are submitted to the sponsor within 90 days after end date. Several agencies, through coordination with the FDP (Federal Demonstration Partnership) and COGR, are adjusting their deadlines to 120 days after end-date. These agencies, most ...more »

Enactment of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act in May, 2014 provides many opportunities for the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Treasury to improve the public transparency of Federal spending while simultaneously reducing the overall reporting burden on both Principal Investigators and institutional Research Administrators. However, there are also many implementation scenarios that ...more »

A single, central reporting portal for all reporting would help achieve the goals of the DATA Act. A central portal should provide the following functions: 1) One Portal a. The goal is to have one place for recipients to report on research expenditures. b. All the agencies conform from the beginning. i. If exceptions are granted, it should be clearly documented who has been granted an exception and, the length of time ...more »

OMB should clarify the parameters for the risk analyses that universities are required to make for their subrecipients under the Uniform Guidance. Such a move would help to curtail the proliferation of individualized standards or action plans established by individual universities seeking to carry out their responsibilities under the as prime recipients with respect to their subrecipients.

Faculty at Princeton University find it frustrating that each agency requires different data in different formats and that not all the web portals work well. For example, the DOE-BES PAMS system does not always save entries, and this can lead to loss of edits. Clicking to save an entry often takes the PI to the login page, often resulting in loss of data. So having a robust portal that automatically saves data entered ...more »

Given that the main product of federally-funded research is typically publications, Princeton University suggests that it would seem sensible to allow submission of PDFs of publications where they have already appeared as a result of the work funded by the grant, and reduce the reliance on extensive research summaries. If nothing has been published, then it makes sense to ask for a report on preliminary progress. NSF ...more »