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Effort Reporting at WUSTL
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Effort
The total activity or work for which an individual is compensated by WUSTL, regardless of the number of hours worked.Effort reporting
Process in which an individual confirms that the salaries charged to sponsored projects are reasonable in relation to the work performed.PARs or Personal Activity Reports
Documents that the University utilizes to confirm salaries/effort on sponsored projects. A PAR presents the payroll distribution as percentages of the actual salary paid during the stated PAR period.
Purpose
Federal regulations require that WUSTL maintain a system which distributes salary charges among direct activities (e.g. sponsored research, instruction, clinical activity) and indirect activities (e.g. administration). Every WUSTL employee who works on a federally funded research project must periodically estimate a distribution of their effort on such projects.
Research is related to teaching, clinical service, and administration. Determining exact percentages for each separate function is difficult. Instead, a reasonable estimate of the categories of work performed is expected. Effort reports, or as they are known at WUSTL, PARs (Personnel Activity Reports), are considered legal documents which attest to the honesty and reasonableness of such estimates.
Significant inaccuracy in PARs percentages can result in the mischarge of costs to sponsors. If such inaccuracy is discovered during an audit, penalties can be severe, and may impact WUSTL and individual researchers both financially and publicly (see examples).
Procedures
The Sponsored Projects Accounting (SPA)website contains information about PARs distribution, timeliness, and processing. The WUSM Finance Office website has detailed definitions of cost accounting categories by function. Each department typically has one coordinator responsible for distributing and collecting PARs. This person should be readily utilized for help with questions about PARs procedural issues.
Problem Detection
Federal and internal audits test compliance with a variety of federal, state, and university standards. Effort reporting is one function that is examined to determine whether material errors are present. This evaluation utilizes several tools, and may review questionable such as:
- assignment of little effort to administration by researchers who clearly participate in administrative duties;
- assignment of high amounts of effort to sponsored projects by researchers with high clinical loads;
- noncompliance with the terms of individual awards (e.g. NIH K-awards which stipulate at least 75% effort)
For more scenarios, please view the effort reporting training pages.
Questions/comments about the effort reporting webpages should be sent to research@wustl.edu