1 Comments
Yes, as of January 1, 2017 award recipients must submit a Final Research Performance Progress Report (“Final RPPR”) no later than 120 calendar days from the end of the award (“period of performance” end date). As described in NIH Guide notice NOT-OD-17-022, the Final RPPR must be submitted via eRA Commons. If a grantee does not comply with this reporting requirement, NIH may hold non-competing continuation awards, or take one or more enforcement actions, consistent with the NIH Grants Policy Statement, Chapter 8.5.2.
Note: Implementation of the Final RPPR for Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants will occur approximately 2 months after implementation for all other NIH grants due to unique final reporting requirements under the Small Business Administration’s SBIR/STTR Policy Directive.
Hello,
I am a university research administrator and am frustrated with the implementation of the Final RPPR before instructions for it have been released, and the lack of accessibility to it in the Assistant Role.
The RPPR manual available at https://era.nih.gov/commons/user_guide.cfm was last updated in November, 2016 and there are no instructions for creating the Final RPPR, only instructions on how to view it. And I think in this case, “Final” means the last RPPR submitted, not the new version which is substituting for the Final Progress Report.
This is because the current manual states “Progress reports are required to continue support of a PHS grant for each budget year within a competitive segment. The RPPR is not used for submitting a Final Progress Report; instructions for submitting a Final Progress Report are at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/finalprogressreport.pdf for NIH” which obviously is no longer true.
I have not yet had to personally tackle a Final RPPR, however, other Research Administrators at my University have complained to me that they cannot view the link for the Final RPPR in eRA commons when they access eRA commons delegated to the Assistant role — it’s only accessible to the PI. They are receiving many questions from confused PIs and are aggravated because they are unable to help due to lack of access to the F-RPPR and instructions.
I wholeheartedly recommend rolling back this requirement until a) complete instructions are available, and b) assistants can log in and view/ work on the F-RPPR. A button could be added to route it to the PI for “signature”/routing to the institutional signing official, as in the regular RPPR.
(As an aside, lack of access to JIT links as an Assistant is also frustrating, but at least there are instructions available.)