Notice Number: NOT-OD-18-234

Key Dates
Release Date: September 24, 2018

Issued by
National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Purpose

As the fiscal year comes to an end on September 30, 2018, NIH encourages Grantee Institutions to verify the accuracy of their grant assignments to Departments or Components within Institutions of Higher Education in eRA Commons through the Grant Re-assign function. Any corrections to the data must be made by 8:00 PM EDT on Friday, October 5, 2018 to be reflected in NIH annual reports.

Background

NIH develops reporting files used to produce data found on the RePORT Website, to increase transparency about funded grants, address inquiries from the Department of Health and Human Services, Congress, and the research community, and to fulfill annual reporting requirements on NIH’s expenditures. The data in these files are “frozen” annually to ensure the reporting files produce consistent and meaningful results. It is imperative that corrections to the data occur through the Grant Re-assign function in eRA Commons before these files are frozen to ensure the veracity of NIH’s FY2018 reports.

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 https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm, selecting FY2018, location and organization. Once the search results return, click on the Excel Export icon (green) located in the right-hand corner. 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 an option on 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.  During the current fiscal year, changes that occur before each Friday evening will appear on RePORTER on the following Monday and on the Awards by Location and Organization website on the following Wednesday if the awards have passed their budget start date as noted in the section above. In all cases, the listings in Commons should be considered official for FY2018 until the deadline for correction. The official frozen awards data are expected to be released through the Awards by Location and Organization page in December.

For more information, please see Section 12.4 Steps for SO to Re-assign a Grant, in the latest version of the Commons User Guide at https://era.nih.gov/docs/Commons_UserGuide.pdf.

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to eRA Commons [email protected].