tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post3979040907884107911..comments2024-03-25T02:33:41.590-05:00Comments on FemaleScienceProfessor: Please Share Your Worst Accounting NightmaresFemale Science Professorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15288567883197987690noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-83813993467586197832009-10-25T13:13:42.272-05:002009-10-25T13:13:42.272-05:00How about a creative 'bait and switch' gra...How about a creative 'bait and switch' grant accounting story? <br />I am a faculty member and senior scientist in a medical school at a major university (call me Prof). Basic scientists in my department are pressured to 'collaborate' with MDs at the med school. For 2 years, a postdoc (we'll call him PhDHe) from a local MDs lab (MrMD) used one of my postdoctoral fellows (PhDShe) for advice and direction on a project, part of which falls in our area of expertise. PhDHe was clueless, so PhDShe told him how to design, score and interpret his experiments. PhDShe also generated and analyzed cell lines that were necessary controls for his project. <br />PhDShe and I were led to understand that this was a collaboration, and MrMD included us and this project on an NIH program project grant. After the grant was awarded, MrMD informed me (Prof) and PhDShe that we would be removed from the budget so the money could, instead, be split between the remaining faculty. MrMD assured me that he ‘reorganizes’ budgets all the time and it is ok. Because this award is a subcontract, NIH will never know that one of the original investigators was cut from the budget. In addition, the data obtained by PhDShe did not support MrMDs model and will not be included in the resulting manuscript. Thus, the work and intellectual contributions of PhDShe will not be acknowledged, and funds spent performing these studies will never be reimbursed. <br />I'm interested in hearing from you and your readers about whether they have had similar experiences with MD researchers at their institutions.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-28065294279503408932009-09-28T11:38:49.883-05:002009-09-28T11:38:49.883-05:00I know it's late, but I have a really good one...I know it's late, but I have a really good one. I am a PhD student at a large university. Every semester (including summer) we have to fill out a form stating where our salary comes from (grant, TAship, etc). One semester the secretary who is supposed to communicate between accounting and graduate students forgot to send out the forms. The next month ALL graduate students in the department didn't get paid. And then we couldn't get paid until the end of the next month since paychecks are only written on certain days. I could survive, but one of my friends had only $100 to his name on that fateful day of no paycheck!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-75199714015747838712009-09-25T03:10:37.858-05:002009-09-25T03:10:37.858-05:00Where to start?
Right before I started my postdoc ...Where to start?<br />Right before I started my postdoc position, my greencard got lost in the mail. So I did not have an official employment authorization in my hand, but I knew the new card would be coming in within the month. The department got me to sign the employment contracts with the (then) current date and said I would get paid for all the time I worked once they got a copy of the greencard. Needless to say, I received my greencard a month later but never got paid for the month that I worked. After trying to follow up on it for months, I had to give up so that I could to the job I was hired to do (science).<br />I will skip numerous cases of utter mess created while my postdoctoral NIH fellowship was being administered, but I will give two examples: When I switched from being paid from my PI's grant to getting paid through my NIH fellowship, the department was no longer paying for my health insurance (instead it was all coming out of my fellowship) yet I noticed that accounting had made an extra premium payment from departmental funds. When I notified the admin person of the mistake, they expressed shock that I would worry about money that was not coming out of my paycheck. And all this time, I thought federal and state money wasted on private health insurance companies was ultimately coming out of my pocket as a tax payer. Here is another accounting mess: One day I noticed a 1cent expense on my financial statement. When I inquired about it, the grants manager found out that another department had mistakenly taken out a certain amount out of my account then reimbursed the amount minus 1 cents. When I asked if they would reimburse the remaining 1cent, the grants manager said it took them $5.68 worth of man hours to figure this out and it would not be worth spending more time for 1cent. (This sort of thing happens all the time, they make a mistake costing someone hundreds of dollars and then argue that trying to fix the initial mistake costs more so we should forget about getting our money back.) I was pretty pissed thinking I was a victim of a scam where some hacker got rich taking 1cent out of millions of university accounts. Several months later another expense for over $30 showed up on my statement. I inquired again to find out this was the same erroneous withdrawal that was supposedly reimbursed. I am still waiting for this to be cleared and my account to be reimbursed hopefully in full. I could go on about my personal nightmares or a close friend's fellowship account being depleted two month earlier than expected because accounting made wrong payments and now he is being asked to go 2 months without pay or find some other source of funding because the fellowship money is not being paid back. And it is more than common for grad students or postdocs to incur expenses for travel, purchase of supplies, or hosting guests and then waiting for several months to get reimbursed, effectively giving the university an interest free loan.<br />It is not hard to imagine the total chaos of trying to administer and account for budgets at the whole university level when a department cannot track its own accounts.<br />It drives me insane just thinking about these.BBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-68447078691166833672009-09-24T15:02:50.712-05:002009-09-24T15:02:50.712-05:00I'm a graduate student on teaching assistantsh...I'm a graduate student on teaching assistantship. We have some "tuition waiver" for TA's but it comes much later than a tuition bill deadline. <br />As a result, an "administrative hold" is placed on student account so a person cannot get official transcripts, cannot register or drop classes and so on...<br />Oh, and a late fee is charged too. It is waived later but there are sometimes problem with this. <br />And if there is another charge at student account (like in student health center for immunizations or medicines) or library charge then it's not separated from all other charges. Even if I pay for medical treatment or lost books the money go to general account (which has several thousands dollars debt) and the charge becomes over due... The result - one more "hold" which takes substantial effort to remove.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-76216394668377681932009-09-24T08:28:30.327-05:002009-09-24T08:28:30.327-05:00Is it too late to contribute?
I once ordered a ni...Is it too late to contribute?<br /><br />I once ordered a nice (but not particularly extravagant) computer for massive data analyses off a grant. The purchasing overlord denied it because she had just bought a perfectly nice computer at Walmart for only $300 and didn't see why I needed to spend 10x that much. <br /><br />I have also had my reimbursements denied because I didn't request the full per diem. WTF is up with that?! How can that possibly be a scam? Now requesting the full amount when you didn't nearly come close to spending that much....perfectly legit, but total scam.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-2887539533224980052009-09-24T07:29:38.300-05:002009-09-24T07:29:38.300-05:00also: the most frustrating theme I'm seeing th...also: the most frustrating theme I'm seeing through all these is that people, particularly grad students, have to front the money for travel and then get stuck with credit card interest when reimbursements take months. This has happened to me multiple times and it drives me up the fruit loop. The only way I've managed to get around it so far is by riding people mercilessly to get a travel *advance* rather than a travel *reimbursement*. The advances are almost always late, true, but at least they arrive a week or two after the travel is over rather than 6-8 months, as is standard for my university.pucknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-31902611856946371952009-09-24T07:25:34.753-05:002009-09-24T07:25:34.753-05:00My personal winner so far: a year or so ago I was ...My personal winner so far: a year or so ago I was getting reimbursed by a grad student-run organization that gives small travel grants to students going to conferences. They'll typically reimburse up to $150 or so for ground transportation, things like airport cabs and subway tickets and the like. However, they refused to reimburse my travel by boat to get to and from a meeting every day and to and from an airport, arguing that boat travel was an "excessive expense", and insisting that only taxis, buses, and trains counted as "ground transportation". The conference was in Venice.pucknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-63410886763914859992009-09-24T07:25:05.011-05:002009-09-24T07:25:05.011-05:00A dear colleague of mine traveled to a distant and...A dear colleague of mine traveled to a distant and foreign land for some fieldwork with an international group of collaborators. The head of the project covered many of their in-country expenses. When my colleague got back and filled out his reimbursement paperwork, he added a note (as required) saying that the Max Planck Institute had paid for part of his costs, to explain why he was not requesting per diem for certain days. A couple months later, his forms are returned with a note from the travel office asking whether this Max Planck fellow works for [our university].Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-8195964420057715102009-09-24T04:52:32.364-05:002009-09-24T04:52:32.364-05:00Accounting incorrectly told my husband they could ...Accounting incorrectly told my husband they could withhold taxes from his NIH stipend. Since my stipend was (correctly) administered as ineligible for standard W-2 withholding, we withheld all our estimated tax burden from his paycheck. 9 months into the year, accounting realized their error and returned all of Dr Hyde's withheld taxes as a lump sum.<br /><br />So as of October, we had paid $0 in estimated taxes on our combined $80K of income. That was an awesomely fun year to do the 1040. We had to beg the IRS not to penalize us. (Amazingly, they complied!)Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hydehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07005652406299754952noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-77830145628570004972009-09-23T22:25:45.558-05:002009-09-23T22:25:45.558-05:00Here is a recurring nightmare. I have had a small...Here is a recurring nightmare. I have had a small ($40K/yr) education support oriented grant for about twenty years as part of a consortium. The prime moves every five years or so, so new sets of subcontracts have to be negotiated. It takes our lawyers a full year to approve any subcontract, so we never get to spend any money the first year in a cycle.<br /><br />It turns out that our accountants had neglected to bill the last year of the last contract and the first three of this. Since that also included our changeover to the "monolithic centralized interwebby accounting system" aka PeopleSoft, many of the records only existed in print outs that I had, and in a tape morgue somewhere in the fifth subbasement of the administration building. <br /><br />The guy who was supposed to do the billing, not only did not know what he was doing, but was smart enough, given the facts, not to want to do it. Since our new prime refused to give us the fourth year money until we billed for the first three, that meant that I had to do the work.<br /><br />After several back and forths with the prime's accounting system, the University got a check for ~140 K$. It took a year to get to that point. Of course now I have to spend two years money in eight months as the supplement with the rollover came in late.<br /><br />Worse, I know of others in the same boat for more $$ and the President is going around moaning about a structural deficit.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14141923572695179691noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-77496139801122984762009-09-23T20:45:22.125-05:002009-09-23T20:45:22.125-05:00We invited the head of our professional associatio...We invited the head of our professional association, a respected and high up guy, to give a talk at a symposium we organised. After he returned, we asked for his tickets stubs, so we could reimburse him. It turns out he had lost one. Our admin refused to reimburse him! <br /><br />He had come, given the invited talk we requested, and left. There was no question that he hadn't done what we asked him to. But he ended up paying for the whole trip himself, and I now cringe whenever I see him.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-21995015854986133402009-09-23T16:48:25.184-05:002009-09-23T16:48:25.184-05:00This one actually happened during my undergraduate...This one actually happened during my undergraduate years, and even though I wasn't really heavily involved in this group normally, somehow I became one of the people responsible for resolving it. <br /><br />Our math department offers a rigorous high school math competition every fall, which is organized by the math union, including a couple professors, some grad students and mostly undergrads, who spend quite a bit of time on organization, registration, writing and grading along with running the contest which has multiple parts and variable scoring. It's a LONG day. <br /><br />We all go out to dinner afterwards, for which we use a departmental or faculty credit card. Due to either general paranoia but probably also a problem in past years, the faculty member who gave us the credit card was adamant about not reimbursing for alcohol, and that we shouldn't even purchase any regardless in case it showed on the itemized receipt he would submit. He admonished us before he had to leave early, too. (We get it. Really.)<br /><br />We went, we ate, we submitted the receipt. Over Thanksgiving break, the department admin or accountant flips out at the faculty member, the organizing senior and for some reason me (I'm not even in the department) for ordering wine. Huh? It turns out that paranoid admin misread the itemized receipt, thinking the name of a reasonably common dessert in French HAD to be a bottle of wine. It took weeks to get the faculty member reimbursed. He apologized for also coming down on us, at least. Not a word from the admin.lost academicnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-36900354990167135772009-09-23T15:35:08.486-05:002009-09-23T15:35:08.486-05:00Hoo boy do I ever?
Not so many months ago I was a...Hoo boy do I ever?<br /><br />Not so many months ago I was a grad student traveling to an international conference on my own fellowship dime. I got all the travel arrangements pre-approved, and was told that I would be reimbursed for meals upon my return, so I kept all the itemized receipts. I then submitted these itemized receipts which detailed the meals I shared with my accompanying SigOth. I didn't submit every meal since I obviously couldn't expect my fellowship to cover his food too. I submitted roughly every other meal we shared which came out to well under the per-diem. I got reimbursed for only half of each receipt despite explaining the reasoning behind all of this. What really gets me is that when I and several other grad students attended the same conference together last year, we did the same thing - nobody dines alone at conferences and the restaurants really didn't want to split the check 8 ways so we just took turns paying and it all worked out. This year, no way.<br /><br />And don't even get me started on the $1000 hotel bill that had to go on my credit card...which they didn't reimburse for several months. I just ate the interest. <br /><br />I've got some even better stories here:<br /><br />http://ambivalentacademic.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-many-accountants-does-it-take-to.html<br /><br />http://ambivalentacademic.blogspot.com/2009/05/silver-linings.html<br /><br />Hope you accounting woes get resolved in some sensible way ASAP.Ambivalent Academichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05908454781195782927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-2973472330194314442009-09-23T14:16:44.816-05:002009-09-23T14:16:44.816-05:00From France:
Delays to reimburse are usually pret...From France: <br />Delays to reimburse are usually pretty long (this is the CNRS - national agency - that is in charge of these things), but it seems to be the same everywhere.<br />However there is something more interesting:<br /><br />When you go to a conference, they usually reimburse you a certain fixed amount per day, that is supposed to cover basically food, transportation and hotel. This seems a good idea since it prevents people from going to 4 stars hotel and so on.<br />However:<br />- if the conference is in France, the amount they will give you is just enough to book a below-average hotel and buy really cheap food.<br />- if the conference is in England it is even worse. You will probably have to pay some of the trip with your own money unless you are willing to end up in really bad neighborhoods and eat at Subways everyday.<br />- if the conference is in the US, it is a little bit better than in France.<br />- but if you go to Brazil, the amount of money will allow you to go to a four stars hotel, take the cab everyday, and go to pretty good restaurants.<br /><br />So I don't know if the people in charge are not very good at estimating the cost of life in different countries. Or, even worse, if they don't know that the cost of life is different in Latin America compared to Western Europe...mixlamalicehttp://laviedemix.over-blog.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-44491885917739414022009-09-22T15:21:45.201-05:002009-09-22T15:21:45.201-05:00Here's one. Administrative assistant in charge...Here's one. Administrative assistant in charge of ordering and budgeting tells me that I have 'plenty' of money in my grant accounts. So I order 2 new awesome pieces of equipment. At years end, she tells me she made a teeny mistake and I'm $20K IN THE HOLE. How's THAT for a worst accounting nightmare? What was even worse was that she wasn't fired and did the same thing to a few other colleagues' grant budgets, to the tune of about $15K. THEN she was fired.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-73327414888655102132009-09-22T14:31:29.263-05:002009-09-22T14:31:29.263-05:00I got burned by accounting for the cost of taking ...I got burned by accounting for the cost of taking grad school candidates out to dinner at a four star restaurant because the number of candidates previously listed and preauthorized for dinner was one less than what showed up (we had one extra candidate). Luckily I got paid back by a foundation account but it took two extra months. And this was a heavy bill, over a grand that sat on my credit card.Genomic Repairmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07755692245709237397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-5055727384413032432009-09-22T00:50:01.379-05:002009-09-22T00:50:01.379-05:00Is this a nightmare? I'm not sure.
I'm a ...Is this a nightmare? I'm not sure.<br /><br />I'm a grad student in a physical science at a large Canadian university (full-time enrollment somewhere around 25k). We switched over to a monolithic centralized interwebby accounting system. It was a painful process, and cost us uncounted (literally) manymany millions of dollars. It is still having huge problems. We frequently speculate how many dollars it actually costs to <i>spend</i> a dollar here.<br /><br />Anyhow, our nightmare? I, and several of my grad student colleagues, have occasionally received extra thousands of dollars in our stipends. Yes, we frequently miss out on pay, and this is usually corrected within a month or two. But this extra pay? It never happened. We dutifully report it to our local department accountants, who try to track it down. Sometimes they do, but more often they insist that it never happened, they have no idea. We are told that it must be our mistake.<br /><br />We are all terrified it's some kind of trap. <br /><br />And where is this money coming from? Somewhere, someone is missing all this money. Maybe they don't know it? How much money is this system "misplacing?".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-56935934784257309692009-09-22T00:45:47.985-05:002009-09-22T00:45:47.985-05:00One ongoing misadventure involves a 1-yr grant who...One ongoing misadventure involves a 1-yr grant whose funding was delayed a year. I submitted a 2nd grant to continue the work that had not yet started before the first grant arrived. Worse, I gave the 2nd proposal the same name, and the amounts only differed by $50 out of $50K.<br /><br />Two problems have arisen - the budget people cannot keep the two grants straight, and the overhead changed a half percent between the two years. The agency demanded a revised budget for the first proposal, and the university hopelessly confused the two proposals. This issue got bogged down between three budget people who always tried to make the other two spur her into action, and generally only acted just before a deadline.<br /><br />Then the dept grants person moved to a different, less stressful job. But not before I sat in her office long enough get the grant started.<br /><br />Now we're in the endless stage of waiting to hear whether the second grant gets funded. Luckily this is not the problem of the student being paid, even though he wrote the proposals, and he is making excellent progress, so we'll soon be writing another proposal.<br /><br />Maybe not an uncommon problem.John Vidalehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09871768524749705799noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-35543099822695706172009-09-21T22:00:29.025-05:002009-09-21T22:00:29.025-05:00How about an accounting blessing? I got a grant f...How about an accounting blessing? I got a grant for 1/2 my sabbatical salary plus supply $$. I didn't end up using the supply $$, so I got a one year extension. With a couple weeks left on the grant, I went to the accounting office, asking how much I had left (expecting the answer to be $200-$400--shipping is always a black box amt). <br /><br />The answer: $28,xxx.xx Totally straight faced. I asked again--same answer. They "forgot" to take my salary out of the grant, and since it was technically two fiscal years ago (due to the timing), the accountant didn't want to go back and fix it.<br /><br />So I had two weeks to spend $28K...A. Non Mousehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13394378770723229180noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-74012313290172290852009-09-21T19:39:23.487-05:002009-09-21T19:39:23.487-05:00PeoplesoftPeoplesoftEliRabetthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07957002964638398767noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-43491386300350894432009-09-21T17:01:30.002-05:002009-09-21T17:01:30.002-05:00Haha: how about this. I'm summoned to explain ...Haha: how about this. I'm summoned to explain why I used university money to buy alcohol at a dinner party that I did not attend. Turns out my colleague included my name into the list of attendees (without telling me) after realizing his bill was too large to justify. What fun!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-3836170370490043892009-09-21T16:12:37.400-05:002009-09-21T16:12:37.400-05:00Not a nightmare, but still bizarre. I'm PI on...Not a nightmare, but still bizarre. I'm PI on a multi-investigator grant that involves support for several students and postdocs. At one point I received an automatically generated transaction report, showing salary transactions for +$5.40, with a corresponding 18 transactions for -$5.40 on the same day. Net result, no change in fund balance, just a completely opaque accounting statement. If you got something like this on your credit card bill, it would worry you, right? This has happened more than once, and yet when I point out to research accounting that their system is cryptic, they act like I must be too stupid to understand it. (anonymously posted to protect the innocent.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-46405595633822945612009-09-21T15:06:25.360-05:002009-09-21T15:06:25.360-05:00Not exactly a nightmare, just frustrating:
1. Acc...Not exactly a nightmare, just frustrating:<br /><br />1. Accountants refused to reimburse us for purchases of bottled water used during field research in a third-world country following a devastating hurricane. Explanations --that there was no potable water, that we would have gotten seriously ill if we consumed tapwater, and that daytime temperatures exceeded 95 F (35 C) requiring 2-3 gallons of water per person per day--fell on deaf ears. <br /><br />2. A recent travel voucher was audited because I claimed LESS than the full per diem allowed. They were convinced I was running some kind of scam (instead of eating/ staying at inexpensive restaurants/ hotels to conserve my grant money).<br /><br />I've made some inroads into the bean-counter mentality by taking admin. staff on field trips with me. It's quite satisfying when they ask (sometimes frantically) why we don't have ice, sunscreen, or insect repellant on hand, and I'm able to explain that these items are not reimbursable, but I'm happy to share my personal stock with them.DrDoyennehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01923421604660796579noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-34587241757384929142009-09-21T13:56:16.483-05:002009-09-21T13:56:16.483-05:00Do you work where I work? Sure sounds like it.Do you work where I work? Sure sounds like it.BBnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29059245.post-36040861848806863952009-09-21T13:16:24.305-05:002009-09-21T13:16:24.305-05:00Our research group recently had a problem with the...Our research group recently had a problem with the University Auditor's Office, as they require that research computers not be charged to the grant since "they are not for exclusive use of this project." What this essentially means is that our department has to buy laptops for PhD students out of its own funds (which has never happened in the past) and most of the money on the grant will be left unused... Our Department Head is currently negotiating with the auditors, trying to convince them of the implicit stupidity in such a move!LoonyTalkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02854083134984117456noreply@blogger.com