Research institutions that went into overdrive to get a piece of the government’s unprecedented, $787 billion stimulus package are now grappling with onerous reporting requirements they must comply with or risk losing the funds. “There are about 99 different data elements that you have to report on each quarter for every award,” explains Lynne Chronister, assistant vice provost for research and director of sponsored programs at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. The task is a particularly tall order for UW, which had received 331 awards, totaling more than $140 million by the time the first quarterly reports were due on October 10. Further complicating matters, a flurry of final-hour clarifications handed down by administrators of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) caught many universities off guard. “They changed the rules on us right before the reporting, so we had to scramble to make a few alterations,” says Chronister.
Consider, for example, the change ARRA made to the reporting required on project impact. “[This information] was supposed to be no longer than 4,000 characters, and we’d gotten that all together from the faculty by September 24. But then they decided they didn’t have the bandwidth for that and reduced it to no more than 2,000 characters, so we had to have our faculty go back and rewrite,” she says. Despite such complications, UW was supremely prepared for the reporting challenge, having built an infrastructure of committees and teams to manage what the school correctly anticipated would be a windfall in ARRA-funded projects. One of the teams, for example, fashioned a reporting tool or datamart which automatically pulls data from four different information systems operating on campus: human resources, finance, purchasing, and sponsored projects. “The reporting team worked very closely with the team developing our [IT] system. They practically lived together for three months to make sure we had everything in our reporting tool that was required,” says Chronister. “We also have a team of seven people that we are calling ‘team ARRA.’ They field questions from campus, and make sure all the fields are filled in and everything is complete.” A detailed article on ARRA compliance requirements and strategies for meeting them appears in the November issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.