Bob Beattie of the University of Michigan asked the Grants.gov S2S mailing list whether data elements on the 424 might change because of the requirements of the FFATA and Kim Deutsch of the NSF responded. I thought this would be of interest to a wider audience. Kim’s response follows: 

You are correct. This subject will be covered at September’s FDP meeting.

The SF 424 Forms Families & FFATA Implementation Subcommittee was tasked by the Chief Financial Officer’s Grants Policy Committee with determining necessary changes to the SF 424 Forms Families for compliance with FFATA requirements.

The Subcommittee reviewed each of the requisite FFATA data elements and reviewed the forms for consistent requirements across all the forms. The Subcommittee recommends a new form be added to all SF 424 form families (with the exception of the R&R where the form already exists) to collect information for Project/Performance Site Locations. The form would be mandated for use across all form families, except Individual, for which it will be optional.

The Subcommittee spent a lot of hours discussing the Areas Affected and Performance Areas and agreed that they could be different. Therefore, Areas Affected by Project will be kept on the forms with some modifications. The proposed Project/Performance Site Locations form uses the one from the R&R forms family as a template but adds the following additional fields:

o DUNS — Required;

o Parish (this would be a global change everywhere that “County” appears in a SF 424 forms family);

o Project/Performance Site Congressional Districts;

o Areas Affected by Project (Continuation from SF 424 Cover Page); and

o Congressional Districts of Areas Impacted by the Program/Project (Continuation from SF 424 Cover Page)

The Subcommittee is working with Grants.gov to develop a Federal Register (FR) notice announcing the proposed changed for comment.