Part I - Overview

Section A: General Overview

Impact of TRAC on academic staff

32. Most of annual TRAC is effectively invisible to academics. It is a post-hoc attribution of costs done by each institution’s finance department. However, the largest single cost for all institutions is academic staff, and the finance department needs a robust method to allocate academic staff time between the five activities recorded by TRAC. This can only be obtained by asking academic staff to provide data themselves.
33. Therefore, for most academics annual TRAC introduced a rather visible, but minimally burdensome, new requirement – to complete a simple set of time allocation schedules every three years. This is important not only for the annual institutional return, but to allow the institution to calculate an indirect cost rate and estates charges for Research. Without accurate time recording of this sort, institutions are unable to recover their full costs.
34. TRAC fEC is much more visible to all academics who apply for research grants. They now have to understand that research incurs costs greater than direct marginal costs, and how to use their institutional systems which will apply it to their project applications. They need to be more aware of TRAC; and of the full range of resources required to carry out the research; and they need to understand how the institutional rates are used in costing their projects. They need some briefing and support. In particular, they need to consider carefully how to estimate their time robustly, to ensure that they do not under-charge and therefore under-recover their costs, that research sponsors are being charged the amount of time for the work that is actually required and that they are not being over-committed. There is little information currently available on this in institutions, and it will take time for estimating processes to become robust. But this is a TRAC requirement.
35. Because research is so important in some institutions, and the pressures of the RAE are so pressing, TRAC fEC has needed careful management in institutions. Far from threatening their RAE outcomes, TRAC fEC provides additional funding to make their research more secure, but it would not be surprising if some academics saw TRAC fEC as a further burden that could damage their research.
36. In reality, TRAC fEC imposes very little extra work on academic staff. They have to estimate the time and resources required for research projects as part of applying for public research contracts. And they have to keep track of their directly incurred costs and progress of the work during the lifetime of projects. But they should be doing this already - it is a requirement of the Research Councils. The main extra work associated with TRAC fEC is for central finance staff, and this extra accountability burden is justified by the fact that institutions will receive a larger amount of public funding for the same volume of research.
37. The Research Councils have also made significant changes to their processes and systems. An important part of these is the Peer Review process. Academics need to adopt some new methods as they review project bids prepared on an fEC basis. In particular, they need to consider whether the levels of resource estimated for the work (academic staff time, the research facilities being used) are appropriate. They also need to consider value-for-money issues if there is a ‘tie-breaker’ between two otherwise equal bids, once academic, quality, and other criteria, have been satisfied.