Effective January 1, 2006
Personnel Expenditure Transfer (PET) process for
sponsored program appointments
As the recipient of federal grant dollars, the University must ensure compliance with both sponsor and University policies. One of the sponsor requirements is ensuring that costs are posted to projects in a timely way, with timely typically being defined as within 90 days of occurrence.
Another mandate is complying with time and effort reporting requirements, which the federal government sees as the way to ensure that it is appropriately charged for researchers activities. This is accomplished by creating Time and Effort reports based on data from the payroll system, and periodically distributing these reports for signature. If payroll charges are posted to a project late, it is quite likely that the time and effort report for the period in question has already been generated and certified, so a revised report has to be created and recertified. This is definitely an audit red flag.
In order to help the campus comply with federal grants management requirements, the process for making retroactive salary transfers (commonly known as PETs) is being modified. Beginning on January 1st, there will be a new PET panel (aptly named Sponsored Project PET) that must be used for any transfer involving a sponsored project number in the project field. An edit on the page restricts the transfer to a time period no more than 3 months before the month of entry so, for example, a PET entered in January can be for a time period beginning no earlier than October 1st, if the employee is paid monthly. The final process modification is that the transfer must be for a percentage of effort, rather than a dollar amount. The costs to be transferred will be calculated based on the employees regular compensation rate at the end date of the PET period. The HR Assist pages are being updated to help HRPs complete the new panel.
There may be a few situations in which a transfer that goes back more than 90 days is appropriate. Such transfers should be requested using a form that will be posted on the Research Foundations web page. Requests will be reviewed and approved, or not, on a case-by-case basis.
Please contact Lori Kehrle (kehrle.2@osu.edu) if you have questions.