November 20, 2019
Dear Teal:
It’s the week before Thanksgiving! We don’t know about you, but we are looking forward to a few days off. Here are a few pieces of news from us.
Purchasing
Some of you have let us know that you are now/still entering purchasing and reimbursements on behalf of faculty. As you know, the campus cut over 500 staff positions in order to reach a balanced budget and invested in direct entry systems to reduce the staff workload. If you have faculty unwilling to enter their own travel & entertainment or other reimbursements and purchases, please let us know who they are and we will happily reach out to them and point them to training materials. We will also visit Council of Chairs or other meetings to make sure faculty understand this expectation. We simply do not have the staffing to take this on.
Research Administration
Significant changes in Composite Benefit Rates (CBR) have been approved and communicated. These are likely to impact your department spending because there are titles that formerly incurred no CBR but will now have CBR assessed:
- Employees with NO benefit eligibility that formerly incurred no CBR will now be assessed a 5.6% CBR
- All Student job titles (undergrad, GSR, and GSI) will be assessed 2.4% CBR
- Limited Employees including Postdocs that formerly incurred no CBR will now be assessed a significant 17.4% CBR
For grant-funded positions where the budget may be fixed for 3-5 years, RAs are looking into individual contract terms to figure out how much rebudgeting authority faculty will have on their awards to cover these added costs. Finally, the regional directors jointly requested a communication from the VCRO to alert faculty across campus to these changes, so that should be forthcoming.
As always, if you have questions, please reach out to us.
We wish you a few relaxing days off.
Teal and Max
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