Key Dates

Related Announcements

None

Issued by

NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH (NIH)
U.S. Food and Drug Administration ( FDA )
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
Office of Research and Development (ORD), Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

Purpose

The purpose of this notice is to inform the applicant community that eRA Application Submission System and Interface for Submission Tracking (ASSIST) will no longer support all application form versions prior to FORMS-E by the end of August 2022.

Background

As part of the federal-wide transition from DUN and Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number to the new government-owned Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), NIH required the use of FORMS-G application packages for due dates on or after January 25, 2022. All agencies were required to transition to the use of UEI by April 4, 2022.

The transition from DUNS to UEI is a significant form change that impacts our ability to share application information between form versions within eRA ASSIST. With FORMS-E, eRA also changed the framework used to build our web applications which also allows the ability to support the older form versions.

Implementation

What does this mean for applicants? First, regardless of submission method (i.e., eRA ASSIST, Grants.gov Workspace, or System-to-system (S2S) provider) applicants cannot submit forms that contain fields for the DUNS ID. Only applications with valid UEIs will be processed by eRA systems. Second, following the retirement of form versions prior to FORMS-E in August, applicants using eRA ASSIST will be unable to copy information from an application prepared with a retired form set to an active FORMS-G Funding Opportunities Announcement.

Users who anticipate needing to copy information from applications prepared with a form set prior to FORMS-E should copy their application data to a FORMS-G application package to preserve the ability to reuse their application data in the future.

Resources

• ASSIST On-line Help: Copy Application

Inquiries

Please direct all inquiries to:

eRA Service Desk

Online Help: https://www.era.nih.gov/need-help (preferred method of contact)
Telephone: 301-402-7469 or 866-504-9552 (Toll Free)