Problems with the National Science Foundation allowing grantees to spend tax dollars for unallowable purposes may extend well beyond a recent case of a $25,000 Christmas party, $11,000 for “premium coffee services,” and $112,000 in federal funds that were spent to hire lobbyists to ask for more funding.
“We found that NSF approved proposed budgets for four major projects, totaling more than $1.4 billion, although it lacked sufficient information to ensure that the budgets represented the basis for a fair and reasonable price,” the National Science Foundation’s Inspector General wrote in a new report.
After 17 months of back-and-forth with auditors, the Ocean Observatories Initiative could still not provide “adequate documentation” showing how it had spent $88 million.
The $344 million Advanced Technology Solar Telescope proposal was “twice found unacceptable for audit in 2010 due to: Unsupported estimates and outdated vendor; Lack of support for labor costs; Lack of support for indirect costs; Unallowable contingencies.”
The science foundation gave $500 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in August 2014 even after the foundation’s own review found problems with their budget estimate. Out of 136 transactions the foundation sampled, it could not find supporting documentation for a single one.
The latter two projects are administered by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
A fourth project, the $434 million National Ecological Observatory Network was the subject of three “inadequacy proposal memos issued over a four month period in 2011” and auditors had an “adverse opinion” on the proposed budget in 2012 “because proposal did not form an acceptable basis for the negotiation of a fair and reasonable price.” More than one-third of the dollars in the budget were “questioned” or “unsupported” in an auditor’s review.
That project is managed by the National Ecological Observatory Network, the same organization that attracted the ire of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, in September after an auditor provided him with a draft audit showing that it had spent money on French hotels and other expenses like the $25,000 Christmas party.
“Spending taxpayer dollars on alcoholic beverages is absolutely prohibited, and spending taxpayer dollars on meals, entertainment, and travel that is not part of official business … is also prohibited,” Grassley wrote.
The project is aimed at collecting data on climate change.
The National Ecological Observatory Network had used an accounting trick to pay itself large “management fees” from the federal grant, which it contended then became the network’s own money that wouldn’t be subject to restrictions on the grant money itself.
But most troubling to congressional overseers was that documents showed that the science foundation had known about what the National Ecological Observatory Network was doing since at least 2008, and did not stop it. It has also accepted other budgets despite problems raised by auditors.
On Feb. 11, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation wrote to the science foundation that the inspector general had identified “accountability over large facility cooperative agreements” as a “challenge.”
The committee asked for “a full accounting of funds” for the projects “to assure Congress and the American public that NSF is prioritizing … financial management.”
