Time: accounting problems caused by Caltech system

Abstract

You report on a National Science Foundation (NSF) audit of Caltech's accounting system in your News story 'Researchers criticized for poor time-keeping' (Nature 449, 512–513; 2007). The audit cited accounting deficiencies, in particular the handling of professorial effort as "voluntary committed cost sharing" as opposed to "voluntary uncommitted cost sharing". Although faculty and staff were following the Caltech accounting practices that were in place at the time, your News story states that researchers "failed to report this to Caltech's payroll system". In fact, we did not have that option because of the deficiencies in the system. The audit report did state that "Caltech's responses, once implemented, should address our audit recommendations".

Additional details