Research Grants Section News

Brexit and EU Grants

The Research Grants Section in Finance is supporting the management of the risks associated with a “no deal” BREXIT in relation to EU Research Grants.  UKRI will be administering the UK Government Underwrite Guarantee, which will provide funding for all successful H2020 and FP7 grants submitted prior to the date of exit, and successful applications for H2020 third country funding following the date of exit. In September 2018, UKRI launched an online portal for UK-based recipients of Horizon 2020 funding to register details of their grants. The RGS team have submitted details of current H2020 and FP7 grants on behalf of the whole University.  RGS is working closely with RSO to ensure that any new grants awarded are included on the UKRI portal.  

With “no deal” still a risk, RGS plan to meet with Colleges to ensure their EU grant information is up-to-date and in a good state of readiness. We cannot emphasise enough the need to keep your grant records up-to-date including ensuring all costs are recorded against the R number and time sheets completed.

Further information is available from SFC here or UKRO here.

 

CRUK Audit

Cancer Research UK will be undertaking their first audit of the University in September 2019. They have already identified the grants they wish to look at, although these may be added to in future. To help you prepare, we have highlighted some common errors picked up during funder audits below.

 

Are you ready for a funder audit?

Each year we have funder audits which raise similar points and concerns. Noted below are some of the comments dos and don’ts for managing your research grant. As noted above, in addition to any Brexit preparations, we are about to be visited by CRUK and expect audits from other funders in the near future. Please ensure that the following is in place :  

• PIs are made aware of grant conditions
• Monitoring of bespoke grant conditions
• Financial transaction reviews to identify ineligible spend
• Exception reporting review to ensure complete and accurate reporting (e.g. burn rates, %ge journals, variances)
• Processes to ensure timely reporting
• PI review and sign off of expenditure at the end of the grant to confirm the grant met the grant conditions
• Periodic review of grant spend and evidence of the checks being carried out (e.g. monthly including budget vs. actual and exception reporting)
• Regular reporting to the PI on expenditure
• Regular risk-based and/or management information driven secondary review of expenditure
• Regular catch-ups between central and local teams to review grant financials and central teams perform sample checking
• Timely response to funder communication and funder queries 

Please remember it is not enough to say we do these checks, we need to be able to evidence that these have been carried out e.g. meeting notes/agendas, signing and dating the monitoring reports, email confirmations, etc. 

Please remember ....

• On Charity Awards we re-claim costs incurred quarterly in arrears, costs should not routinely be moved in and out of the grants. Only the costs that you intend the funder to cover should be charged to your grant and these must be in line with the terms & condition of the award. This should keep corrections to a minimum and allow timely completion of the claims

 

Research misconduct and bullying and harassment reporting

Many funders require us to report upheld cases of research misconduct and bullying and harassment. This should be reported promptly to funders. Please contact Elizabeth.Welch@ed.ac.uk if you have any cases that need to be reported for 2018 2019 financial year. 

 

UKRI Terms and Conditions of fEC grant and Training Grants

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has updated its fEC Grant Terms and Conditions and Training Grant Terms and Conditions. In this revision UKRI has set out expectations relating to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, safeguarding, bullying and harassment and to guard against duplicate funding.  

UKRI’s position relating to payment of costs for familial leave for fEC Grants has been clarified, and our policy position relating to sick leave has been amended on both fEC Grants and Training Grants.

 A new condition relating to peer review has been introduced, which is intended to encourage researchers in receipt of UKRI funding to undertake a review where possible, reflecting peer review’s importance to the UKRI vision to ensure that world leading research and innovation continues to grow and flourish in the UK.

 As part of this exercise supporting information which was previously included within the terms and conditions has been moved into an accompanying guidance document which should be read in conjunction with the updated fEC and Training Grant Terms and Conditions. UKRI has consulted with the UKRI Research Organisation Consultation Group regarding the impact of these changes.

The updated fEC and Training Grant Terms and Conditions will take effect from 28 June 2019 and are available here.

 

Do you have EU funded equipment?  

A recent institutional audit undertaken by the EU auditors has highlighted the need to ensure that equipment or property purchased with EU funding should, in accordance with the EU grant terms and conditions (visibility agreement) have the EU emblem physically attached to EU funded equipment/property. A number of items sampled in the recent audit did not comply with this requirement. We have contacted the Schools concerned but please be aware of this requirement for future purchases.  

 

REF readiness

We are about to enter our annual Ref readiness checking period. However, you can start now by reviewing your PI/CO percentage splits via the WebFirst PI/CO Staff Time (133) report. Please update worktribe with any changes. You can also check the job code status or research active "RA"status of your grants via the WebFirst Code Book (110) report. Please email finance.helpline@ed.ac.uk with any "RA" status changes, noting the email should be for the attention of appropriate RGS team. When GASP start their annual data checking exercise the information sent out to you for rechecking should be correct or changes minimised.  

 

RGS Staff News  

We would like you to welcome our new staff to the SCE Research Grants Team :

• Murray Bell
• Marieke Blair
• Manju Nair
• Barbara Linfield

Loukia Koutsoventi has now moved over to the role of Research Grants Manager for MVM, covering for Gary Halliday who is now on secondment to the CORE systems project.

 

GDPR and document retention

Don't forget that some research funders will have different document retention periods to the University.  If you have documents that have not been scanned electronically to the Finance System and which need to be held for different retention periods we recommend that copies are retained locally until a central solution can be delivered. Further information on funder retention periods is available here.

 

Wellcome Trust

If you have Wellcome Trust grants you may be interested in the handouts from the recent presentations, in particular, the Grants Funding policy update which containts recent clarifications on pensions, leave, visa funding rules etc.

Research Management Conference 2019

Presentations from the Research Management Conference are available below: