Key Dates

Related Announcements

NOT-OD-22-215 - NIH Final Federal Financial Reports (FFRs) will no longer be converted to Interim Annual Reports in the Payment Management System

NOT-OD-22-099- Upcoming Changes to the Federal Financial Report (FFR) Beginning April 1, 2022

NOT-OD-21-060 - UPDATE Implementation of Requirement to Submit the Federal Financial Report (FFR) in the Payment Management System

NOT-OD-21-046 - Reminder: Mandatory Submission of the Federal Financial Report (FFR) in the Payment Management System Beginning January 1, 2021

NOT-OD-20-127 - Upcoming Mandatory Submission of the Federal Financial Report (FFR) in the Payment Management System Beginning January 1, 2021

NOT-OD-21-128 - Updated Process for Submission of Federal Financial Reports for Closed Payment Management System Subaccounts

Issued by

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH (NIH)

Purpose

The purpose of this Notice is to provide an update to NIH recipients who need to submit an SF-425 Federal Financial Report (FFR).

As acknowledged in NOT-OD-21-060, recipients have reported a significant increase in errors in submitting reports via a single-entry point. The errors are mainly caused because the system does not allow recipients to submit reports that do not reconcile expenditure versus quarterly cash transaction data. When the data does not reconcile, the HHS PMS will not accept the reports. These challenges have begun to create delays in reporting and certifying expenditure FFRs as required by the terms and conditions of the awards. NIH and its eRA partners recognize this has impacted recipients ability to submit timely final FFRs in accordance with established deadlines outlined in the terms and conditions of award.

Beginning in March 2021, in order to prevent the errors and facilitate recipient FFR submission, on behalf of NIH, PMS began converting all NIH Final FFRs to Interim Annuals FFRs in order to relax the validation. This action will be systematically taken by PMS on a weekly basis. The data on these reports will be populated by PMS as follows:

• Line item 10a Cash Receipts- is populated based on all the drawdowns that occurred from the date of award thru the report period end date. It is a snapshot of time, and this is an editable field; therefore recipients are able to revise the amount if needed.
• Line item 10b Cash Disbursements- is populated based on the cash disbursement amount reported on the last Federal Cash Transaction report that was certified. Note: this is an editable field; therefore recipients are able to revise the amount if needed.
• Line item 10d Total Federal Funds Authorized- is populated based on all the obligations received thru the report period end date.

Recipients should indicate in the Remarks section that this is a Final FFR. The FFRs will be reviewed by NIH OFM staff as Final FFRs. As a reminder, unliquidated obligations may not be reported on the Final FFRs for the terminal year of the project period; line 10f Federal Share of Unliquidated Obligations must be zero.

Inquiries

Please direct all system policy inquiries to:

Systems Policy Branch
Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration
OPERAsystemspolicy@nih.gov

The FFR due date and the data on Lines 1 thru 9 are populated by NIH eRA. If any of this data on the FFR is incorrect, please contact the eRA Service Desk directly.

eRA Service Desk
Submit a web ticket: https://grants.nih.gov/support/index.html
Toll-free: 1-866-504-9552
Phone: 301-402-7469

For all inquiries related to Line item 10a Cash Receipts, 10b Cash Disbursements and line item 10d Total Federal Funds Authorized, please contact PMS Helpdesk at 1.877.614.5533 or you can submit a ticket to PMS using the self-service web portal: https://gditshared.servicenowservices.com/hhs_pms. Please ensure that you provide the Payee Account Number (PAN), PMS Document Number and Sub-account number and provide the details of the issue.