Changes to under-recovery administration

Dear Colleagues,

As President Kornbluth recently shared with the MIT community, the Institute is allocating new central resources to DLCIs to support under-recovery of F&A costs on research grants and is streamlining administrative processes for managing under-recovery.

What you need to know:

• Faculty will no longer need to seek under-recovery funding from multiple sources. A central budget for under-recovery will be allocated to DLCIs for local decision-making beginning this fiscal year. (Sloan plans to use its own resources to manage under-recovery.) Faculty will request support for under-recovery from the DLCI administering their research. 
• A new app to facilitate requests, reviews, and reporting is in development (as part of Research@MIT). The initial feature of this app – an easy, efficient portal for faculty and research administrators to request under-recovery funds – will launch this fall. When complete, the under-recovery app will provide DLCI leaders and administrators with a dashboard and a built-in workflow for receiving, reviewing, and approving under-recovery requests.

Information sessions are available for directors of administration and finance, fiscal officers, and research administrators to review the changes and view a demonstration of the under-recovery app in development. We encourage you to forward this message to any members of your staff to whom this information may be useful.

We are very pleased to significantly increase central funding for under-recovery and introduce new workflows intended to simplify the process of requesting and tracking this funding. We view this as an experiment and would very much appreciate your feedback as we implement these changes over the next few months. 

Sincerely,

Cynthia Barnhart
Provost

Glen Shor
Executive Vice President and Treasurer 

Maria T. Zuber
Vice President for Research