Grant Incentive Program

Colleges or schools are eligible for incentive funds if PIs in that unit charge the full indirect rate to their grant. Current rates can be found on the ORSP website. Each college is entitled to develop their own policies for fund allocations. The Business Director will know what the college or school's policy is.

The indirect rate charged to a grant can be found on the Grant (Project) Statement report.  

Funds become available the fiscal year after the indirect costs are incurred. After the fiscal year end, time is needed to close the books and have an external audit performed. Grants accounting then identifies the eligible expenses.

The data is then appended to actual grant end dates with considerations for grants that may hold multiple account numbers or those that received extensions.

Spreadsheets containing incentive awards are expected to go out mid to late fall. Units that need to access expected funds before this process is complete may contact the Office of Research and Innovation at innovation@marquette.edu. Bridge funding may be established on a case by case basis.

 

Each faculty member who is given incentive funds by their college may establish an account to hold these funds. Incentive accounts use the Responsibility Center or RC format of a 19 prefix, so the account will be xx-19xxx-00000-xxxx. If you do not have an account, your Business Director will be able to help you establish one. Once established they will also be able to help you get a budget loaded through the Office of Research and Innovation using the available amount from their spreadsheet.

Earned funds may be used for the life of the grant, plus two full fiscal years. If a grant ends in FY19, any incentives generated from that grant will expire June 30th, 2021.

Oldest earnings will be used first, minimizing the loss of earnings when possible.

To maximize the impact of the program you should plan on spending at least the amount that is going to expire each year by either direct expenses or by offering it back to your college to support department level expenses.

The Office of Research and Innovation and the unit Business Director will update tracking of the funds every year. Tracking will primarily occur by account.

As new funds become available only once a year, you should be able to take the amount that you were told you had available, minus your current year expenses to find your balance of available funds.

The amount awarded to each unit is dependent upon the overall grant activity of the university with regards to full indirect recovery and the role that that unit had in driving that activity. Annual indirect charges are expensed by the university. The incentive program is not a return or redirection of these funds as there is no budgetary carry over. The incentive program is instead a seperate budget line item based on performance and is a cost of research growth activities. 

Up to $380K is given in incentives for indirects recovered up to $1.9M. Additional incentives are given for additional performance at a rate of 39%. 

Above the $1.9M baseline the formula to determine how much a unit earned in incentives becomes:

(.39*x*y - 361000x) / y

x = Unit indirect costs recovered at full rate

y = Total university indirect costs recovered

 

A simple estimator is below.