Notice Number: NOT-OD-15-160

Key Dates
Release Date: September 21, 2015

Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Purpose

As NIH’s fiscal year comes to a close on September 30, 2015, NIH encourages grantee officials to verify the accuracy of the FY2015 award information reflected in NIH systems to ensure the most complete and accurate information is reflected in FY15 reports. Beginning this year, a new function is available through the eRA Commons to make changes to School/Department assignments for your institution’s awarded FY15 grants. This new function replaces the previous procedure for making changes to School/Department assignments. Any corrections to the data must be made by 8:00 PM EDT Monday, October 12, 2015 to be reflected in NIH reports.

Background

Each year, NIH develops reporting files that are used for the reports found on the RePORT Website, to address inquiries from the Department of Health and Human Services, Congress, and the research community, and to meet annual reporting requirements on NIH’s expenditures. The data in these files are frozen to ensure the reporting files produce consistent reports. It is imperative that corrections to the data occur before these files are frozen to ensure the veracity of NIH’s FY2015 reports. In the past, officials were asked to submit changes to the eRA Commons Help Desk with the required reassignments for grants at the institution. This process is now obsolete based on the availability of the Grant Re-assign function in eRA Commons.

Authorized Organization Representative or Signing Official

Only the Authorized Organization Representative (AOR) or Signing Official (SO) has the authority to submit corrections for a grantee organization or investigator. The AOR is the designated representative of the grantee organization in matters related to the award and administration of its NIH grants, including those that require NIH approval. The AOR role is documented as part of the electronic submission process and is authenticated through the Grants.gov registration process. In the eRA Commons, this individual holds the SO role. Although NIH requires that the grantee organization designate such an official, NIH does not specify the organizational location or full set of responsibilities for this official.

Verifying Your Information

Verify the accuracy of the grant award information for your organization by going to the NIH RePORT Awards by Location and Organization site at http://www.report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm, selecting FY2015, location and organization. Note: Only awards that have passed their budget start date at the time of the data load will appear. This most often affects fellowships that have not been activated, but can also affect a small number of awards that have delayed budget start dates.

Making Corrections

There is a new option in the Commons Status page for Signing Officials that allows for grants assigned to the current fiscal year to be re-assigned within the institution. The search page for the grants allows a search by NIH grant number, Contact Principal Investigator name, or for grants currently assigned to a School or School/Department combination. One or more grants may be selected from the hit list for reassignment, and the destination School/Department can be selected from the current institution hierarchy as mapped in the eRA database. Requests for changes of department names or creation of new schools or departments should be submitted to the eRA Commons Help Desk as is currently the practice. Changes made in the Commons will be visible in the Commons immediately. Changes that occur before each Friday evening will appear in RePORTER on the following Monday and in the Awards By Location website on the following Wednesday. However, only awards that have passed their budget start date at the time of the data load will appear in RePORTER and Awards by Location and Organization. This most often affects fellowships that have not been activated, but can also affect a small number of awards that have delayed budget start dates. In all cases, the listings in Commons should be considered official. The official frozen awards data will be released through the Awards By Location and Organization page by early December.

For more information on the Grant Re-assign function in Commons, please see the latest release notes at https://era.nih.gov/news_and_events/news_eRA.cfm#08252015. You can also see the slide set presented to the Commons Working Group on September 4, 2015 at https://era.nih.gov/files/Re-assign_Grants_v3.pptx.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

eRA Service Desk
Need Help? website