Compliance Monitoring
Compliance Monitoring
Compliance Monitoring provides guidance regarding federal, state and non-federal regulatory compliance in research administration, financial compliance and audit. CMSI contributes to strategic planning of risk mitigation and remediation, and proactive risk management, including recommendations for policy and SOP changes and adjustments.
CMSI uses extensive knowledge of research administration to assess potential audit risk and compliance requirements; informs and implements solutions needed to address and mitigate risk to improve proposal development and fiscal management. CMSI develops metrics through highly complex data applications and provides structured data and recommendations for mitigation and resolution, to departments, Hubs, and Senior Leadership.
CMSI evaluates and assesses operational capability and compliance; and provides potential risk mitigation and remediation strategies for use by senior leadership in support of reports to the Provost, Chancellor and Board of Trustees.
Portfolio Reviews
CMSI engages with other ECU units for proactive review of selected funded portfolios. Designed to identify potential financial compliance issues, these reviews also serve to identify best practices in sponsored programs management, and to enable these innovative approaches to be shared with the ECU research administration community.
CMSI conducts administrative reviews and provides regulatory guidance and opinions on compliance of externally funded projects at the college and school level and the internal operations of REDE. The observations and recommendations are intended to provide information on the effectiveness and vulnerability of internal controls. The goal is to monitor the integrity of the administration of externally sponsored funding, provide reasonable assurance of compliance, and develop model compliance plans and mitigation strategies at the institutional level.
Risk Inventory
The Risk Inventory is a semi-annual review of the most common audit issues associated with sponsored program management and oversight.
The Inventory serves as a “roadmap” to identify opportunity for continuous improvement of research administration, reducing faculty burden in managing their funded projects, and detailed analysis of financial risk associated with grants, contracts and cooperative agreements.
CMSI provides a portfolio of data analyses and related reports designed to facilitate day-to-day sponsored program management, as well as quarterly analyses of the status of ECU financial compliance. Monitoring reports are provided to department research administrators, Hub personnel, and central Officer of Research Administration staff to facilitate day-to-day sponsored project management on behalf of faculty researchers.
Monitoring reports are senior level institutional reports to inform enterprise risk management and continuous improvement. These reports include expenditures that are considered questionable or unallowable, time and effort charges, special cost considerations such as cost-share and subrecipient awards, as well as the methods used charging and monitoring projects.
HERD
CMSI manages the annual NSF HERD Survey, one of the large-scale nationally representative data sets of the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). The HERD is the main aggregate statistic to describe R&D performance within the Higher Education Institution sector (HEI). It is a measure of intramural expenditures, synonymous with the performance of R&D. The data are used to measure and report research and experimental development trends, the sciences and engineering workforce, U.S. competitiveness in science, engineering, technology and research and experimental development, and the condition of U.S. STEM education at the national and global levels.
