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Governance Minutes ArchiveJanuary 22, 1992
Minutes COMMISSION ON RESEARCH January 22, 1992 206 Sandy Hall 3:30 p.m. MEMBERS PRESENT: T. Brandon, C. Burger, E. G. Henneke, G. R. Hooper, I. Leech (for R. Lytton), R. Olin, P. Scanlon, M. Stephenson, E. R. Stout, L. A. Swiger, V. Wall, J. Wightman, T. Wildman MEMBERS ABSENT: V. Bonomo, J. Cowles, D. M. Denbow, M. Lambur, J. C. Lee, R. Rich INVITED GUESTS: M. D. Shelton, J. Tank, A. Snoke, S. Muse, J. Hoernemann, G. Linkous 1. ANNOUNCEMENTS. a. Dr. Stout provided the Commission with copies of 2 articles related to the future funding of science. b. The Conflict of Interest procedures have passed University Council. It will be dis- tributed to the general faculty. c. Special Faculty Appointments. Dr. Stout stated he had met with the Commission on Faculty Affairs in December and that they had passed it with a requirement for a reorgan- ization of the structure. The Commission on Faculty Affairs want all the benefits written into a separate section instead of in every de- scription. A new section - 2.4.7, Special Faculty Research Appoint- ments - Benefits, was added. It will get to University Council very shortly. It will go as a joint resolution from the Commission on Re- search and the Commission on Faculty Affairs. d. Budget. Dr. Stout stated that he could not add much to the budget information the member- ship had read in the newspapers. The Research Division 5% reduction for FY93 is $1,352,188. In addition to that 5% there is a couple of other hits we will get. The College of Veterinary Medicine since its beginning has had a $50,000 appropriation for research. It is a spe- cial appropriation to support new projects in the College of Veterinary Medicine when the college was established and it will not be there next year. Dr. Stout also stated that our 2 Commonwealth Centers - Va. In- stitute for Materials Science and Wood Science and Technology would face a 30% reduction in the second year of the biennium. In the fol- lowing biennium the Commonwealth Centers are supposed to gradually go to zero funding. Over the next four years that will cost us over a million dollars in those two centers. Dr. Wightman asked if there was any good news. Dr. Scanlon stated he had heard that they were trying to do something new with trust funds. He stated that that can be good. Dr. Stout stated that he had received a note from Larry Hincker that the higher education part of the pro- posed bond issue has been released at $401M and our part is $43M. Dr. Swiger stated that all those items in our pamphlet for the first biennium are in at a reduced rate. Dr. Scanlon stated that they are being strongly supported by the Secretary of Education. Dr. Stout stated that the CIT is under major stress. They will get a 33.6% reduction next year, and the following year there is nothing in the budget for the CIT. There will presumably be a review of their ac- tivities and accomplishments starting sometime in February or March. It is to be completed by August. The Governor's budget staff will do the review. He informed the Commission that Governor Holton is confi- dent that CIT shall prevail. Dr. Stout told the members that in the 6 years of CIT's existence, this University has had something over $22M - direct CIT funding and another $30M in industry funding that came with the CIT funding. 2. AGENDA. Dr. Art Snoke asked if his being there was covered on the agenda. Dr. Stout responded yes under item 6 and proceeded to intro- duce other guests of the Commission on Research. He stated that he wanted to expand item 6 basically to include suggestions from the mem- bership about what kinds of services the Office of Sponsored Programs and Research Division should be supplying. He introduced Dr. Arthur Snoke, Department of Geological Sciences, and from the Research Division/Office of Sponsored Programs: John Hoernemann - Systems Ana- lyst, Sandra Muse - Director of Financial Administration, and she is also OSP liaison with the controller's group who deal with FRS, Bud Harris, Associate Director, and Garnett Linkous, Manager of the Pro- posal Review and Negotiation Section. Motion to approve agenda was made and seconded. Agenda was approved. 3. MINUTES OF DECEMBER 11, 1991. Dr. Burger motioned approval of Minutes and Dr. Wall seconded. Minutes were approved. 4. FRS DISCUSSION. Dr. Stout wrote on the board those problems with FRS mentioned. 1. Report format - cannot read the report; 2. Technical report due dates; 3. Payroll detail; 4. Dr. Wightman stated the re- cent addition of SPO's entered from the department and appearing on the printout was positive; 5. Legal jargon; 6. No way to encumber salary dollars; 7. No projection of budget needs; 8. Attribute coding; 9. Object codes; 10. Unusual transactions; Dr. Olin stated one member of his department was overpaid by NSF off of 2 different grants. She put the money back into the grant but cannot see where the money went. 11. Lots of delays in billing the sponsors; 12. Account statements are of- ten too old to close out account; 13. List of object codes for founda- tion accounts. Dr. Burger said that they had called and asked for a list of codes and that they wouldn't give it to them. Dr. Scanlon stated that he had not heard major complaints about the Office of Spon- sored Programs and that one person there was referred to as an angel. He stated that the only negative was that there seems to be a problem with rotation of the people that meet you when you bring over a pro- posal. Dr. Swiger stated that he had a myriad of compliments to pass on concerning the Office of Sponsored Programs. Dr. Stout stated that as soon as FRS was discussed, OSP suggestions would be discussed. Mr. Shelton then led the discussion of the FRS items. Mr. Shelton stated he wanted to specifically go over the first 2 items. He said a few items he could do something about, and some he felt he may not be able to at all. In the first one he stated that they recognized when they put the system up that the report formats were probably not going to be what everyone wanted. The advice from the manufacturer of the software and the consultants was to put the system up for a year and run it in its standard form so people could find out what they did and did not like. That was the plan. Mr. Shelton stated that one of the things that they probably did wrong was not telling everyone how much of a phased approach they were designing in the system. Unfortunately, after that the budget cuts came and the staff to do some of the techni- cal things did not come along nearly as fast as needed. However, he stated that they were addressing that item because they are using an- other software product called Focus that has a report menu being devel- oped right now. He stated that he felt the report menu would go a long way towards addressing a lot of these problems. Mr. Shelton said that one of the things they did when they looked at the accounting system was to interview over 200 people on campus to find out their views. He stated that many of those things they listed have been done, some of them are still on the to do list and some have been written off as never being able to do them. Mr. Shelton stated that they are ready to test the FRS menu process. They are going to go to Engineering and see if they want to pilot this product. Mr. Shelton asked for a committee of users to assist in designing a report format for OSP. Dr. Stout stated he will send a memo to the members asking for nominations. Mr. Shelton stated he hopes that he has a good answer for the second item - technical report due dates. The system has an on-line screen that provides the attribute being requested. He stated that they are coming up with a different set of attributes that will define all the possible report due dates. They plan to build a table based on that. They plan two proposals: 1. Within that FRS menu screen there would be a separate menu screen that provides all the technical report due dates. 2. They could create an E-mail message which would send out a message so many days before the report due date alerting the person that the report is due. Dr. Snoke asked if this could be progress re- ports as well as final reports. He told Dr. Snoke that would be possi- ble. Dr. Stout asked the membership if an E-mail message was the most direct way to do this? Mr. Shelton stated that he was not sure what was meant by payroll de- tail. Ms. Sandra Muse said that even with the new payroll distribution sheet they would still like to see the names of those people paid on the printouts. Mr. Shelton said that that is not an FRS problem - that it is a payroll system problem. He said that the payroll system that we have is not capable of sending that information over to the FRS sys- tem. He said what we have to do is write a new program that would shift that information from one place to the other. Mr. Shelton said that they had had that on their list and delayed it several times be- cause of something else more pressing. Dr. Olin asked that people be sensitive to acronyms and jargon. Mr. Shelton stated that he could appreciate that. He said he would make sure that he talks to his folks about that. Mr. Shelton stated that salary encumbrances were on their to do list as well. He stated that it will be addressed, but he does not know when because of the payroll system. Mr. Shelton asked about the item "lack of projection". Dr. Swiger re- ported Vernon Boggs stated that there was no projection of budget needs - FRS is more of an accounting tool and not a budgeting tool. Mr. Shelton said that parts of this system that they bought has some budg- eting function in it. He said that they had not acquired that and did not feel that they ever would. The system will handle all the budgets that are out there, but it will not do forecasting or projecting of the budget. Concerning attribute codes, Dr. Swiger said that it could use refine- ment especially in cost sharing accounts. Mr. Shelton said that if the attributes could be refined that would help people like Vernon a lot. He stated that they do need to be revised. Dr. Swiger provided some comments from Pat Ballard. She stated that the current move to get FRS attributes streamlined is very positive, for example getting college codes all under one set of numbers by using current senior management as the one and only code. Concerning object codes Dr. Burger provided an example. She said that they had redis- tributed money to researchers to take a trip and it came up under med- ical and lab supplies. Mr. Shelton agreed that that does sound odd. He said that he doesn't have a solution other than the fact that all of those codes should be coded at the department level. Mr. Shelton said he did not know why the foundation will not give out the object codes. Dr. Burger said she was told sorry we do not give those out. Mr. Shelton asked if unusual transactions were miscellaneous or other types of transactions. Dr. Olin referred back to the faculty member who was overpaid by NSF and put the money back into her grant but could not see where the money was deposited. Mr. Shelton said that the re- venue section is covered by the same thing as an object code. There is a revenue source code that would take care of the bulk of all entries. There are other revenue source codes that would spread out other types of revenue. If the transaction did not get entered into the right source code it would get buried in with everything else. Mr. Shelton asked Dr. Olin to have that person call him. Dr. Snoke asked when questions come up who should one get in touch with. Mr. Shelton re- sponded that all the expenditure ones the right person to call is Larry Lawrence. Also Lenwood McCoy gets a lot of calls. Mr. Shelton said that they do try some sort of training on an individual basis. Delays in billing the sponsors. Mr. Harris stated that the accounting statements that the administrators bill from, the administrators can see something is wrong but they can't see what the correct data should be. Mr. Shelton said that they have had problems in the past in bill- ing letters of credit. He said letters of credit billing are current so those projects that have letters of credit funding should be seeing revenue coming in quickly. He said they have currently underway a de- velopment project where they are writing some computer programs that will extract data automatically from FRS and develop billings to the federal agencies for reimbursable contracts. Mr. Shelton said that he had a good answer for late statements. They will be available on line anytime. Mr. Shelton summed up that 3 or 4 of the items we are working on or are willing to work on, 2 or 3 are on the in process list and there are at least a couple that they don't know if they will ever be able to solve. He said that one of the real complaints that they often have with FRS is that the data is inaccurate. He said that when they really explore that, they find that it is not timely but not inaccurate. 5. RESEARCH DIVISION/OFFICE OF SPONSORED PROGRAMS. Dr. Stout stated at the outset that we certainly view the Office of Sponsored Programs as a service organization. We are there to serve the faculty but we have several others to serve: sponsors, auditors, etc. First of all we want to serve the faculty. We are here to listen to suggestions that you have that you would like to see us do or maybe there are some things we do that you would like to see us quit doing. Dr. Snoke sug- gested a sort of tickler and he said that the system being suggested by Mr. Shelton would go a long way toward that. He said that the letters sent out after you receive a grant have vastly improved - a lot more informative, a lot less jargon, comprehensible in ways that the earlier ones weren't. Dr. Snoke said NSF is very bad about communicating with individual researchers. Places like NIH communicate with individual researchers, but NSF persists in sending announcements to the institu- tion. Dr. Stout asked if OSP receives the communications from NSF. Ms. Muse stated that we usually get a notification of a change. She stated that they don't supply us with multiple copies of that informa- tion. We have to request it, and it is very limitedly provided. Dr. Hooper asked if they had that on-line from NSF. OSP and others receive information on bitnet. Dr. Scanlon stated that he was wondering whose responsibility things are. He said he did not feel he needs prompting to know when his re- port is due because it is part of his responsibility. He said that putting together a budget for a proposal is a good exercise, that you know what is going on and you know how to manage your project better when you do that. Dr. Olin said he did not send anything in until they ask for it and so far that system has worked just fine. He said the Math Department has solved the problem with NSF. Every area of math- ematical research with a principal investigator in the Math Department has a connection with a program officer at NSF. They send E-mail back and forth. OSP receives E-mail messages from NSF. The problem is how do we get those in the hands of the people who need them? Dr. Leech asked for more support in the area of statistics - working through a project. Dr. Stout responded that there is the Statistical Consulting Lab in the Statistics Department that provides that service. Dr. Scanlon asked if there is an area that you can fall between 2 budget cycles in the same organization. You know the money is coming and the current agency does, but the administrator does not. He asked how we deal with that. Dr. Stout responded that it would be one of two ways. If your department head is sufficiently convinced that it is coming, we will accept a letter of guarantee from the department head and set up a project based on that. In a few other cases on a one on one basis with the department and the college participating we figure out from somewhere how to carry a person for a month or something like that. Dr. Scanlon stated he felt that people don't skillfully use the cover sheets. He said faculty don't know how to negotiate with depart- ment heads, deans or whomever. Dr. Hooper stated that it could be ad- dressed in a newsletter sometime. Dr. Henneke stated that, for example, they always check that they do not need more space, but in fact they really do need more space. When the project starts they find another corner of a lab that they can squeeze things into. Dr. Snoke asked what attitude does the University have if you ask for resources which are beyond the capability of the University? Dr. Hooper said that there had been cases where proposals don't go because space isn't available. Dr. Snoke asked where does the responsibility end? Mr. Harris stated that some people really do use the Internal Approval Form. Some forms come through almost looking like contracts between the faculty, department and college. Dr. Stout stated that the more of that you have spelled out up front the fewer headaches you have later on. Dr. Snoke asked what they could take from this? Dr. Stout said we will certainly go back and discuss each of the items. 6. ADJOURNMENT. Meeting was adjourned at 5:15PM. ERS/php
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