Meeûs – a self-help resource for the FP7 user community

This relates to the earlier post about productive hours in FP6 projects.

The Commission has issued guidance to auditors that states, inter alia, “It is impossible to define a general correct figure for productive time … The auditor must use his professional judgment to decide if the productive time used for calculation is reasonable.” Elsewhere in its guidance, though, the Commission suggests that a typical figure for productive time is around 210 days per year.

A lot of organisations normally consider a much smaller number of days as productive, e.g. figures as low as 150 or 170 days are not unusual. There is accumulating evidence of ex-post auditors tending to challenge such figures, because they apply the Commission’s indicative figure quite rigidly.

The other day I heard about a university  that for years has typically applied a figure of around 160-165 productive days in its FP6 projects. The figure had never been challenged by the Commission’s Financial Officers, but now it has been challenged in an audit, together with a recommendation that all of the university’s FP6 projects must now be recalculated on the basis of  a figure nearer 210 days. This is ridiculous: the Commission/auditors are in effect re-writing the rules retrospectively.

It would be interesting to learn about how many productive days other organisations have typically claimed successfully in their FP6 cost statements to the Commission.

It would also be interesting to hear from anybody who has had their FP6 productive hours calculation challenged by the auditors, and with what consequences.