Hi Colleagues,

This email will be relevant to you, perhaps, only if you have one or more grants/sponsored projects that uses a fixed price account mechanism and especially if your account time period has ended recently. But if you have any fixed price accounts, you will want to read this email to help you plan for the distribution of residual funds by shared credit percentage down the road.

As a reminder, I’ve shared already that REDKE has a new means for dealing with residual funds from fixed price accounts. Rather than holding those funds in the project account itself beyond the project period, when the project ends, those fixed price residual funds will be transferred to a single, investigator-specific fixed price residual account. That way there are not lots of open accounts that linger for years. So this should not be new news, and it is good news for investigators to have a more streamlined way to deal with those funds.

What I am wanting to communicate today is that REDKE is doing those account distributions now for this year’s accounts, and Can Saygin wants to make sure Principal Investigators are aware that when they do that, the residual funds will be divided among the investigators on the grant in terms of their share credit percentage. So, for example, if you are PI and you have a Co-I on the project, and you each have 50% of the shared credit, the residual funds will be split 50/50 and divided into two accounts evenly, one for the PI and one for the Co-I.  Sometimes the shared credit on the submitted grant does not match up with the actual “effort” or contribution later---sometimes Investigators step off projects altogether—but unless the shared credit was adjusted accordingly, the end-of-project residual fund distribution will follow the original/existing shared credit percentages. So, if those need to be changed, do it before the project ends to avoid distribution of residual funds in a manner in consistent with the actual project implementation. The policy regarding this is listed in the HOP and can be found at the link below.

Here is the message I was sent from Dr. Saygin—as more info—in case the way I described it above is not clear: “As we are doing close outs on Fixed Price contracts and distributing balance among PI and Co-PIs according to shared credit, some faculty members seem not to know this policy.

Please distribute in your colleges: https://www.utsa.edu/hop/chapter10/10.14.html

If a PI does not agree on a CO-PI’s performance and thinks the CO-PI should not get the fixed price distribution, that needs to be handled by revising the shared credit percentages in the project; not after the fact or by complaining about performance. All faculty members receive “credit” based on shared credit percentages so if those are not accurate, then it is PI’s responsibility to fix it.”

Let me know if you have any questions about this, but contact the Post-Award office or GCFS directly if there needs to be any modifications to  shared credit on your grants.

Hoping your summer is starting off smoothly.

Michael

Michael J. Karcher, Ed.D., Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research

Professor of Educational Psychology (pronouns: he/him)

College of Education and Human Development, University of Texas at San Antonio 
501 Cesar Chavez Blvd., Suite DB 4.337 (DT); MB 3.476 (Main Campus) 
San Antonio, TX 78207 
(210) 458-2032; 458-2650 (department)
michael.karcher@utsa.edu

ORCID ID: 0003-1970-8263