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Grant Clinic

Who owns the supplies ordered off of a grant that is now expired?

Reader Question: I understand that equipment ordered off a grant that has expired is owned by the institution responsible for administering the grant, but is the same true for supplies? For example, could I sell my old unused zip drives on eBay? Should the proceeds from that sale go back to the institution? Or back to the funding agency?

Expert Comment: Whose grant is it? Go ask that of your grants administrator or your dean of research and you will be told, “It's our grant” (along with the implied, “...and don’t you forget it!”). Yes, your institution owns every bit of it, down to the last pencil you bought with the direct-costs funding. It all belongs to them.

Specifically, the institution owns the equipment (items costing $5,000 or more and have an estimated two-year life) purchased by a federal grant. (Items costing less than $5,000 are considered “supplies.”)

When the grant period ends, the institution can give the equipment to another PI to do research or use the equipment for educational purposes. Of course, if a PI moves during the life of the grant, the equipment can be transferred to the new institution with the approval of both institutions. In either event, it will be logged in and tagged with a unique identifier that goes into the institute’s data base of inventory. The organization can lend it to another researcher or let it remain on a shelf, unused, which is very often what happens.

As for the supplies, they should not be sold for profit. If they are still usable after the grant ends, they stay with the institution. With approval from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), you can sell some items, but the monies must be put back into the grant as "program income" and the monies must be used for grant research purposes.

The best practice is to keep the supplies with the originating institution.

(I thank Jerome Itinger, director of grants and contracts at the College of Health and Human Development, Pennsylvania State University, for helping to clarify this point).

Comments by William Gerin, PhD, P.I. e-Alert's chief grants consultant, professor of biobehavioral health, Pennsylvania State University, and author of Writing the NIH Grant Proposal: A Step-by-Step Process (SAGE Books, 2006)

This eAlert is brought to you as an informational training tool by the Principal Investigators Association, which is an independent organization. Neither the eAlert nor its contents have any connection with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF), nor are they endorsed by these agencies. All views expressed are those personally held by the author and are not official government policies or opinions.