Preparing an NIH Final Report
Helpful Links
- GCA Close out Guide
- NIH Final Report policy
- NIH Final report requirements
- Template for final report
- GIM 39: UW Policy on Closeout of Sponsored Programs
The Final Financial Report
The final report for the budget will be prepared and filed by GCA and not the PI. In order for GCA to complete the final report, the budget should be ready for close-out. This means that all invoices should be paid, there should be no outstanding encumbrances, and any costs that were charged to the wrong budget must be fixed. In addition, if there is an overage, you should have approval from your administrator to transfer the outstanding balance to a different budget. A full explanation of budget close-out procedures is available on the GCA website.
The final financial report is due 90 days after the end of the budget period. If the project has prepared the budget adequately but GCA does not seem to be taking action, it might be effective to have the PI contact GCA directly.
Science and Technology Report
The final report must be submitted 90 days after the last budget period has ended.
If you have a funded competing renewal, supplement, or other grant that continues the same project, you only need to submit a progress report. If you submitted a competing renewal containing a final report, you do not need to resubmit the report even if your grant was not funded.
Every final report should include a summary of all grant activity. Most investigators refer to their specific aims and explain how each aim was achieved. You do not need to explain major changes from the application as you should have been doing that in your progress reports.
In addition you should include:
- Human Subjects inclusion table with a report on the inclusion of women and minorities
- Report on inclusion of children
- A description of any data, protocols, research materials, software, interventions or other information that can be shared with other investigators and how the PI plans to share this information
- Publications that arose from the grant (All publications must be submitted to Pub Med Central.)
- A Final Invention Statement and Certification for all projects regardless of whether inventions arose from the project or were previously reported.
- Any other specific information that is required by the funding letter
More information
Submitting the Final Report
When the final report has been completed, convert all documents to pdf, and email them to the centralized closeout center at NIH (DeasCentralized@od.nih.gov) unless other directions or a different close out address is given in your funding letter.
In your email ask for a confirmation that the final report has been received. Save this confirmation in case NIH does not record the receipt of your report.
What happens if you do not submit?
If either financial or scientific progress reports are not submitted, NIH may restrict funding to the university. For this reason, the UW will heavily penalize all PIs with late reports. While staff and PIs cannot always control whether GCA is submitting the financial report, they can see that the budget is ready for closeout and submit the scientific and technical report in a timely manner.
PIs and staff contacts on the GC-1 will have warning 45 days prior to the end date of a project and another warning on the end date of the project. If a PI’s project is delayed more than 30 days past the report due date (120 days past the project end date for NIH) OSP will no longer review or submit grants for that PI.
If a financial report is being delayed through no fault of the PI, please make the supervisors at GCA aware of this problem.