The basics of effort certification at UW-Madison

This module makes several references to an effort coordinator – an individual who performs a new role in sponsored projects administration. An effort coordinator reviews each certification and assists faculty and staff with the process of certifying effort. The UW’s colleges and schools (and some of the other divisions, like the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene) have identified individuals to serve as effort coordinators. Each effort coordinator has been trained to answer questions and support the certification process.

Whose effort must be certified?

Effort must be certified for all UW faculty, staff, students, and postdoctoral researchers who either:

1.		Charge part or all of their salary directly to a sponsored project, or
2.		Expend *committed* effort on a sponsored project, even though no part of their salary is charged to the project.

Who certifies for whom?

Effort must be certified by a responsible person with suitable means of verifying that the work was performed. This is a federal requirement. It is NEVER acceptable to circumvent this rule.

You must certify your own effort if you are any of the following:

•		A faculty member
•		An academic staff member
•		A principal investigator (PI) on a sponsored project

Each principal investigator certifies the effort for the graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and classified staff who work on his or her research projects.

Sometimes the PI doesn't have a suitable means of verifying the effort for all the people who work on a project - and someone else, like a lab manager, does. In such cases, the PI and the effort coordinator can work together to establish a designee's authorization to certify for project staff members.

Sometimes a staff person works on multiple projects for two or more PIs. In such cases, any one PI with suitable means of verifying all the effort can certify. Or, to collaborate in certifying the staff person's effort, the PIs can enlist the help of an effort coordinator.

When must effort be certified?

For classified staff, effort must be certified four times a year. For faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and all other staff, effort must be certified twice yearly.

Each time you certify effort, you do so for a specific period of performance:

•		For classified staff, the periods correspond to calendar quarters.
•		For everyone else, the two periods are (1) January through June, and (2) July through December.

The time during which you certify effort is called the certification window. Each certification window begins a month or more after its corresponding period of performance.

Each time a certification window begins, you have 90 days to certify the effort for the corresponding period of performance. The certification window may be expanded for those periods that occur during the transition to the new Effort Certification and Reporting Technology (ECRT) system. The detailed certification calendar is published on the RSP Web site.

Recertification

If you think you have certified effort incorrectly, contact your effort coordinator to ask about recertifying.

Within the certification window, your effort coordinator can approve a request to recertify.

Once the last date of the certification window has passed, a subsequent recertification can call into question the reliability of the certification process. Therefore, your request must explain why the effort was erroneously certified, and why the requested change is more appropriate within the context of law, federal requirements, or University policies and procedures. Your written request will be reviewed by the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Administration. Only in the most compelling of circumstances will it be approved.

How to certify effort

Use the Web-based ECRT system to certify effort for faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students.

For student hourly workers, the timesheet serves as the mechanism for certifying effort.

ECRT cannot be used to certify the effort for some individuals. This includes:

•		Faculty and staff with zero-dollar, zero-percent appointments
•		Some faculty and academic staff members who have left the university and can no longer log in with a UW-Madison NetID

Modules in this course describe how to certify with ECRT. If you cannot certify your effort with ECRT, contact your effort coordinator with questions about how to certify.

Certifying effort versus certifying payroll

Your effort statement shows, for a specified time period, the sources from which you were paid and the percent of your salary that was charged to each source. This payroll information is an important building block of the effort statement. But it's not the only thing you should think about when certifying your effort.

It would be a mistake to think of the effort certification process as "confirming that this is how you were paid by the university." Remember that when you certify effort correctly, you are providing an assurance to the sponsor that:

•		The university's salary charges are reasonable, given the work that was performed, and
•		Faculty and staff have met their commitments to sponsors, regardless of whether the university requested salary support for the effort.