1. How will IDC be distributed to colleges as RCM takes effect?
Indirect cost returns are collected centrally in the Office of the Vice President for Research (VPR) based on grant and contract expenditures, and per the Florida Statutes, these funds must be used in support of research. Each fiscal year, the VPR will deduct the following charges from the IDC that accrues to your unit as follows:
- A proportional share of the administrative costs needed to run the university's grants and contracts operation
- A proportional share of charges in support of services used by all researchers (such as the Libraries)
- Specific fees to pay for service to your unit or in support of service to your unit (such as Animal Care, IRB, etc.)
- A 10% IDC return to PIs in your unit and 7.5% to centers and institutes designated to receive a share of IDC.
The remaining funds will be returned to the deans of the colleges in support of research.
2. How is the support unit budget for libraries determined and spread among the colleges?
To get the support unit budget for the HSC/Main/Marston Libraries, we used data from the “2009-10 All Funds Budget” that was submitted to the Budget Office by 4-digit DeptID. For the Libraries excluding Law, we used Funds 101, 102, and 211 to generate the Library Support Unit cost. If the 4-digit DeptID was 5517 that was designated as HSC Library, and all other 55’s were designated as the Main/Marston libraries.
For the Law Library, we used the “2009 Allocation Document” sent to the College of Law for DeptIDs 2404 and 2417 in Fund 101 totaling $2,977,231. We used this number instead of the “2009-10 All Funds Budget” number because we felt that the college may spend more than was initially budgeted in 2009-10 since we saw some fluctuation to that effect in 2007-08.
Once we obtained the above numbers, we calculated the overhead that was charged to the Libraries for IT, General Admin, and Facilities. We took the sum of the Library support unit cost and the associated overhead off the top of the State Appropriations prior to running the RCM formula to generate the teaching/enrollment allocations to colleges for their instructional activities.
The next step was to take the HSC/Main/Marston libraries support unit costs plus overhead and allocated them all based on weighted students Headcount and weighted faculty FTE.
- The HSC Library cost was allocated to the Health Center Colleges or Health Center State Funded Centers (example would be the Brain Institute) based on their weighted students and faculty.
- The Main/Marston libraries cost was allocated to the units as follows:
- Main Library costs are: Fine Arts, DCP, CLAS, Latin American Studies, Business, Journalism, Law, Education, Engineering, HHP, Agriculture, DOCE, and the E&G State Funded Centers.
- The units being charged for the Marston Library are:
- Agriculture
- Engineering
- CLAS.
We have not changed the algorithm from what we had discussed previously. We are looking at eliminating the separate calculation of the Marston Library and treating it the same as the main library which would be to charge all E&G colleges and state funded centers for a combination of the Main/Marston Libraries.
Once the above allocations were calculated, we added that amount to each college’s State Appropriation in the “Revenue” section, and we also allocate that same amount in the Library line of the “Overhead” section. This basically results as a pass-through to each college and have only added it into the process for transparency.
For the Law Library, the only unit affected is to the Law School, no other college was allocated costs from the $2.9M. The other $1.1M showing in the Law School is for the Main Library. This is also a pass-through for the Law School.