You’re Certifiable

It’s that time of year again: effort reporting and certification is upon us.  Wayne State relies upon effort reporting for faculty and staff on grants to confirm that salaries and wages charged to sponsored projects are reasonable for the agreements in place and the actual work performed.  Without effort reporting and certification compliance, financial penalties and expenditure disallowances could result.

 

In order to help navigate the effort certification system, the folks at CLAS put together some very helpful materials:

• Certifying Your Own Effort
• Certifying Employee Effort

 

And for further reading on the process itself, check out SPA’s effort reporting page.  If you have any difficulty with the system or figuring out who needs to certify whom, RAS has been there and can offer guidance!

A Herculean Effort

Effort reporting is the proverbial thorn in the side of all persons working on federally funded grants.  Most grant personnel categorize effort reporting as mysterious, annoying and distracting from the conduct of vital research.

Effort reporting, however, is directly vital to the execution of all grant-funded research: it is the way institutions prove to federal auditors that employees did, indeed, work on a specific federally funded project during the specific time requested in the application, and at the correlating level of effort.  The funding agencies need to know that dedicated monies are being spent according to the terms of the notice of grant award/contract and as defined (and required!) by the U.S. Office of Management and Budgets (OMB). Remember, salary and fringes are allowable costs within the OMB – as long as the paid individual is working on the grant’s objectives and if appropriate “time and effort” records are maintained.

Having trouble certifying yourself or an employee?  Here are some instructions developed by the research support staff in CLAS on how to use the system:

• Certifying Your Own Effort
• Certifying Employee Effort