Sneak Preview: NIH, NSF Review Awardees’ Grant Compliance
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will better track and address the various factors leading to funded institutions’ delinquency in submitting final financial and progress reports, in response to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found NIH has not always closed out awards when recipients do not file final reports within one year of a project’s end date, as required under NIH policy.
GAO found that although NIH recently has made efforts to ensure timely closeout, “it has not identified or addressed the factors that contribute to late reports. As a result, NIH cannot ensure that it is holding recipients accountable and identifying misspent funds.” GAO said that as of August 2024, nearly 1,000 final progress reports were delinquent, or about 0.2% of awards made by NIH from federal fiscal year (FY) FY 2014 through FY 2024.
In addition to recommending that NIH issue updated guidance to address the factors contributing to delinquent final financial and progress reports, GAO also recommended that NIH analyze how its institutes, centers and offices use offsets, extensions and budget restructuring to manage unused balances for projects at the end of the funding period and develop a resource on the risks and benefits of each approach.
Finally, GAO recommended that NIH require each institute, center and office to track award recipients' unused balances across their respective award portfolios. NIH agreed with the recommendations.
NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the U.S., and more than 80% of its budget funds extramural research on a range of health-related topics. GAO said NIH funded approximately $35 billion in external biomedical research in federal fiscal year (FY) 2023, an increase of nearly 30% from FY 2014 (after adjusting for inflation). This $35 billion supported nearly 65,000 ongoing research grants and other awards to external entities, largely institutions of higher education. During the period 2014 through 2023, NIH increased its oversight administrative staff by about 400 positions (20%). GAO said although it sought data on the effect of recent Trump administration actions on oversight staffing levels, NIH could not provide such information.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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