Tips: May 3, 2019

SPARCS Tips

Following are this week's tips which will help navigate these changes - 

• New DOD Requirements: On April 2, 2019, Michael McQuade sent an email out to campus explaining the DoD has new reporting requirements. The SPARCS Help Desk will be able to assist in the Pending portion of this new requirement. In the event the Research Administrators (RA) need this information for a proposal submission, a request should be sent to the SPARCS Help Desk containing the following information as per current practice of handling NSF & DOE submissions:

✓ Proposal Key Personnel Name
✓ Proposal Key Personnel AndrewID
✓ Date information is needed

The SPARCS Team will use reports available to send the "pending" information to the requestor within 24 hours. The pre-awards team will also be trained on using the specified reports to help with this task to handle any emergencies. *Please Note* RAs will need to query Oracle for "current" support.

• NIH Salary Cap: On April 17, 2019, the NIH issued NOT-OD-19-099 indicating the NIH Salary Cap had been raised to $192,300 effective January 6, 2019. All NIH-related sponsors have been updated in SPARCS to reflect the new cap.
  • The NIH retains a historical record of the current and past salary cap amounts and effective dates at this link: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/salcap_summary.htm. You may find it helpful to bookmark this.
• Activity Updates: The following activities have been updated to better assist in managing SPARCS funding proposals:
  • UPDATE DEPARTMENT STATUS: Previously any comments provided in this activity were removed once the activity was executed. We have updated this to retain the previous comments. This activity is now available to all personnel with access to the funding proposal.
  • MANAGE ANCILLARY REVIEW: We found that some actions were being performed within this activity and the system was saving the action but not recording it on the History tab. This typically occurs because there is an additional popup window when you select “update” within the activity. We have now updated the activity so that when any action is taken the details will be available on the History tab.