Effort Reporting

Certification of effort is required by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and is set forth in Circular A-21, “Cost Principles for Educational Institutions.” As a recipient of federal funds, CSUF ASC is required to ensure that effort expended on sponsored activities is certified. The effort reporting system assures federal sponsors that salaries and wages are consistent with the effort devoted to the projects they sponsor. Effort Certification must be included with every time-sheet submitted for staff and non-professorial employees. The Office of Sponsored Programs will distribute Faculty Effort Reports to the Project Director on each account at the end of each semester.

Effort certification is the means by which an employee documents the proportion of time allocated to each of the activities in which he or she is involved. Effort certification differs from payroll distributions in that effort certification describes the allocation of an employee’s activity to individual projects, independent of salary. Employees are required to identify all institutional services for which they provided effort (even if they received no salary support), and ultimately report the appropriate distribution of effort over all activities. Do not include effort spent for non-institutional purposes.

The person completing and signing the effort certification must have “suitable means of verification” of the effort expended. This is required to ensure that the effort certification system reasonably reflects actual effort expended in the various categories during the reporting period. A Project Director may certify the effort of non-faculty key and other personnel on the sponsored project, as long as the Project Director has “suitable means of verification” of the activities performed by the employee. An employee must sign his or her own certification if he or she alone has “suitable means of verification” of all effort expended.

When properly filled out, effort certification provides a record of 100% of employee effort. The effort percentages for effort certifications must total exactly 100%, regardless of the actual number of hours expended on those activities. Effort is defined as the total scope of responsibilities, regardless of the actual number of hours worked. It is important to note that effort is not calculated on a 40-hour work week. If an individual normally works 50 hours in a week, 40 hours represents 80% effort.

All employees involved in certifying effort must be aware that penalties may result from incomplete effort certification. Signed effort certifications are considered legal documents in which a person attests to the accuracy of the effort spent on sponsored projects. Material inaccuracies in effort certifications can result in the misallocation of costs to sponsored projects, which can negatively affect the University and Project Director both publicly and financially.

Faculty Additional Pay

CSUF ASC follows CSUF and CSU policy for additional pay on grants and contracts. Requests for additional pay are processed through the University side in the office of Lisa Kopecky.

The California State University Office of the Chancellor provides guidance on the payment of overtime for a non-exempt employee's additional employment assignment. This guidance is set forth in Code: HR 2002-05, in which, the Vice Chancellor of Human Resources explains that Article 36 of CFA MOU limits CSU employment (i.e., employment compensated through the CSU payroll) to the equivalent of one full-time position in a primary work assignment, and additional employment (overload) of up to 25% of a full-time position. However, an employee may be employed outside of their regular assignment up to 125% between the last academic workday of an academic year and the first academic workday of the next academic year as reflected in the academic calendar. Additionally, an employee may be paid 125% during other academic breaks, such as Winter Intersession.

Additional employment is allowed at a different rate of pay if appropriate for the work performed and if allowed by the external funding/granting source. However, in the case of a federal grant or contract, the rate of pay for the additional employment must be the same as the CSU base rate of pay for the primary assignment. To calculate time as a percentage of the academic year total dollar amount, first convert the salary to an hourly rate for accurate computation and payment. Follow this formula: divide the faculty member's annual salary by 1360 hours (which is the gross number of contractual hours per academic year). This rate will equal the hourly pay rate. For a maximum daily rate for CSU Faculty Special Consultant Pay, multiply the hourly rate times 8. For federal grants, the maximum daily rate and the amount actually paid should be equal.