Who is required to have a certified Effort Report? Why do individuals without any sponsored program activity have to certify their effort?
All exempt employees within a department that administers a sponsored program are required to complete effort reports. Rationale: Currently, we cannot easily centrally define all individuals with commitments to sponsored programs. If we were to limit effort certification to just those individuals whose salary is charged all or partly to sponsors, we could potentially exclude individuals who have made commitments to research sponsors and are not charging their salary to the projects (for example, many faculty only charge summer salary to grants but work on grants, and are committed to do so, during the academic year). In the next one to two years, we hope to have an effort commitment database in place to help us identify only those individuals with sponsored program commitments, so that we can reduce the number of individuals for whom an effort report is required. In the interim, we have identified a few classifications of exempt employees who historically have had very few, if any comm
