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Rascal Nick Of's avatar

And heads need to roll. There’s nothing preventing all this from happening again in the absence of real accountability. How’s it USAID head Samantha Power is worth over $30m on a government salary of $180k? It’s not enough to just uncover the fraud and end it. Examples need to be made.

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JBP's avatar

I was an auditor at Purdue Research Foundation, quite a while ago. The overhead/burden rate was a pretty ridiculous subject. To their credit PRF actually looked into what was overhead being used for.

The shocker for me was that Purdue got a significantly less amount of overhead from NSF (we were specifically auditing NSF grants) than MIT or Stanford. I keep seeing 65% as the rate but seem to recall the Boilers getting something like 35% and MIT getting 45% or 50%.

We followed up with NSF who dutifully told us, 'it takes more to run an institution like MIT or Stanford, so we pay them higher overheads'. So MIT and Stanford paid higher salaries, had more expensive lab equipment and went to more conferences/junkets than Purdue, because they declared they like to spend more money than Purdue.

I like the across the board maximum of 15%. The Universities can allocate the overhead any way they like, but can compete on actual pricing rather than a rigged system like it was.

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