Prior to award of a TIA, your responsibilities for determining that the recipient is qualified are the same as those of a grants officer who is awarding a grant or cooperative agreement. Those responsibilities are described in subpart D of 32 CFR part 22. When the recipient is a consortium that is not formally incorporated, you have the additional responsibility described in § 37.515.

(a) When the prospective recipient of a TIA is a consortium that is not formally incorporated, your determination that the recipient meets the standard at 32 CFR 22.415(a) requires that you, in consultation with legal counsel, review the management plan in the consortium's collaboration agreement. The purpose of your review is to ensure that the management plan is sound and that it adequately addresses the elements necessary for an effective working relationship among the consortium members. An effective working relationship is essential to increase the research project's chances of success.

(b) The collaboration agreement, commonly referred to as the articles of collaboration, is the document that sets out the rights and responsibilities of each consortium member. It binds the individual consortium members together, whereas the TIA binds the Government and the consortium as a group (or the Government and a consortium member on behalf of the consortium, as explained in § 37.1015). The document should discuss, among other things, the consortium's:

(1) Management structure.

(2) Method of making payments to consortium members.

(3) Means of ensuring and overseeing members' efforts on the project.

(4) Provisions for members' cost sharing contributions.

(5) Provisions for ownership and rights in intellectual property developed previously or under the agreement.

(a) You must determine the qualification of the recipient, as described in §§ 37.510 and 37.515.

(b) As the business expert working with the program official, you also must address the financial aspects of the proposed agreement. You must:

(1) Determine that the total amount of funding for the proposed effort is reasonable, as addressed in § 37.520.

(2) Assess the value and determine the reasonableness of the recipient's proposed cost sharing contribution, as discussed in §§ 37.525 through 37.555.

(3) If you are contemplating the use of a fixed-support rather than expenditure-based TIA, ensure that its use is justified, as explained in §§ 37.560 and 37.565.

(4) Address issues of inconsistent cost accounting by traditional Government contractors, should they arise, as noted in § 37.570.

(5) Determine amounts for milestone payments, if you use them, as discussed in § 37.575.

Administrative agreements officers of the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Office of Naval Research can share lessons learned from administering other TIAs. Program officials can be a source of information when you are determining the reasonableness of proposed funding (e.g., on labor rates, as discussed in § 37.520) or establishing observable and verifiable technical milestones for payments (see § 37.575). Auditors at the Defense Contract Audit Agency can act in an advisory capacity to help you determine the reasonableness of proposed amounts, including values of in-kind contributions toward cost sharing.

In cooperation with the program official, you must assess the reasonableness of the total estimated budget to perform the research that will be supported by the agreement. Additional guidance follows for:

(a) Labor. Much of the budget likely will involve direct labor and associated indirect costs, which may be represented together as a “loaded” labor rate. The program official is an essential advisor on reasonableness of the overall level of effort and its composition by labor category. You also may rely on your experience with other awards as the basis for determining reasonableness. If you have any unresolved questions, two of the ways that you might find helpful in establishing reasonableness are to:

(1) Consult the administrative agreements officers or auditors identified in § 37.505.

(2) Compare loaded labor rates of for-profit firms that do not have expenditure-based Federal procurement contracts or assistance awards with a standard or average for the particular industry. Note that the program official may have knowledge about customary levels of direct labor charges in the particular industry that is involved. You may be able to compare associated indirect charges with Government-approved indirect cost rates that exist for many nonprofit and for-profit organizations that have Federal procurement contracts or assistance awards (note the requirement in § 37.630 for a for-profit participant to use Federally approved provisional indirect cost rates, if it has them).

(b) Real property and equipment. In almost all cases, the project costs may include only depreciation or use charges for real property and equipment of for-profit participants, in accordance with § 37.685. Remember that the budget for an expenditure-based TIA may not include depreciation of a participant's property as a direct cost of the project if that participant's practice is to charge the depreciation of that type of property as an indirect cost, as many organizations do.

You must:

(a) Determine that the recipient's cost sharing contributions meet the criteria for cost sharing and determine values for them, in accordance with §§ 37.530 through 37.555. In doing so, you must:

(1) Ensure that there are affirmative statements from any third parties identified as sources of cash contributions.

(2) Include in the award file an evaluation that documents how you determined the values of the recipient's contributions to the funding of the project.

(b) Judge that the recipient's cost sharing contribution, as a percentage of the total budget, is reasonable. To the maximum extent practicable, the recipient must provide at least half of the costs of the project, in accordance with § 37.215.

You may accept any cash or in-kind contributions that meet all of the following criteria:

(a) In your judgment, they represent meaningful cost sharing that demonstrates the recipient's commitment to the success of the research project. Cash contributions clearly demonstrate commitment and they are strongly preferred over in-kind contributions.

(b) They are necessary and reasonable for accomplishment of the research project's objectives.

(c) They are costs that may be charged to the project under § 37.625 and § 37.635, as applicable to the participant making the contribution.

(d) They are verifiable from the recipient's records.

(e) They are not included as cost sharing contributions for any other Federal award.

(f) They are not paid by the Federal Government under another award, except:

(1) Costs that are authorized by Federal statute to be used for cost sharing; or

(2) Independent research and development (IR&D) costs, as described at 32 CFR 34.13(a)(5)(ii), that meet all of the criteria in paragraphs (a) through (e) of this section. IR&D is acceptable as cost sharing, even though it may be reimbursed by the Government through other awards. It is standard business practice for all for-profit firms, including commercial firms, to recover their research and development (R&D) costs (which for Federal procurement contracts is recovered as IR&D) through prices charged to their customers. Thus, the cost principles at 48 CFR part 31 allow a for-profit firm that has expenditure-based, Federal procurement contracts to recover through those procurement contracts the allocable portion of its R&D costs associated with a technology investment agreement.

You rarely should accept values for cost sharing contributions of real property or equipment that are in excess of depreciation or reasonable use charges, as discussed in § 37.685 for for-profit participants. You may accept the full value of a donated capital asset if the real property or equipment is to be dedicated to the project and you expect that it will have a fair market value that is less than $5,000 at the project's end. In those cases, you should value the donation at the lesser of:

(a) The value of the property as shown in the recipient's accounting records (i.e., purchase price less accumulated depreciation); or

(b) The current fair market value. You may accept the use of any reasonable basis for determining the fair market value of the property. If there is a justification to do so, you may accept the current fair market value even if it exceeds the value in the recipient's records.

You should limit the value of any contribution of a fully depreciated asset to a reasonable use charge. In determining what is reasonable, you must consider:

(a) The original cost of the asset;

(b) Its estimated remaining useful life at the time of your negotiations;

(c) The effect of any increased maintenance charges or decreased performance due to age; and

(d) The amount of depreciation that the participant previously charged to Federal awards.

No, you may not count any participant's costs of prior research as a cost sharing contribution. Only the additional resources that the recipient will provide to carry out the current project (which may include pre-award costs for the current project, as described in § 37.830) are to be counted.

(a) In most instances, you should not count costs of patents and other intellectual property (e.g., copyrighted material, including software) as cost sharing, because:

(1) It is difficult to assign values to these intangible contributions;

(2) Their value usually is a manifestation of prior research costs, which are not allowed as cost share under § 37.545; and

(3) Contributions of intellectual property rights generally do not represent the same cost of lost opportunity to a recipient as contributions of cash or tangible assets. The purpose of cost share is to ensure that the recipient incurs real risk that gives it a vested interest in the project's success.

(b) You may include costs associated with intellectual property if the costs are based on sound estimates of market value of the contribution. For example, a for-profit firm may offer the use of commercially available software for which there is an established license fee for use of the product. The costs of the development of the software would not be a reasonable basis for valuing its use.

For types of participant contributions other than those addressed in §§ 37.535 through 37.550, the general rule is that you are to value each contribution consistently with the cost principles or standards in § 37.625 and § 37.635 that apply to the participant making the contribution. When valuing services and property donated by parties other than the participants, you may use as guidance the provisions of 32 CFR 34.13(b)(2) through (5).

(a) To use a fixed-support TIA, rather than an expenditure-based TIA, you must have confidence in your estimate of the expenditures required to achieve well-defined outcomes. Therefore, you must work carefully with program officials to select outcomes that, when the recipient achieves them, are reliable indicators of the amount of effort the recipient expended. However, your estimate of the required expenditures need not be a precise dollar amount, as illustrated by the example in paragraph (b) of this section, if:

(1) The recipient is contributing a substantial share of the costs of achieving the outcomes, which must meet the criteria in § 37.305(a); and

(2) You are confident that the costs of achieving the outcomes will be at least a minimum amount that you can specify and the recipient is willing to accept the possibility that its cost sharing percentage ultimately will be higher if the costs exceed that minimum amount.

(b) To illustrate the approach, consider a project for which you are confident that the recipient will have to expend at least $800,000 to achieve the specified outcomes. You must determine, in conjunction with program officials, the minimum level of recipient cost sharing that you want to negotiate, based on the circumstances, to demonstrate the recipient's commitment to the success of the project. For purposes of this illustration, let that minimum recipient cost sharing be 40% of the total project costs. In that case, the Federal share should be no more than 60% and you could set a fixed level of Federal support at $480,000 (60% of $800,000). With that fixed level of Federal support, the recipient would be responsible for the balance of the costs needed to complete the project.

(c) Note, however, that the level of recipient cost sharing you negotiate is to be based solely on the level needed to demonstrate the recipient's commitment. You may not use a shortage of Federal Government funding for the program as a reason to try to persuade a recipient to accept a fixed-support TIA, rather than an expenditure-based instrument, or to accept responsibility for a greater share of the total project costs than it otherwise is willing to offer. If you lack sufficient funding to provide an appropriate Federal Government share for the entire project, you instead should rescope the effort covered by the agreement to match the available funding.

Yes, for a research project that is to be carried out by a number of participants, you may award a TIA that provides for some participants to perform under fixed-support arrangements and others to perform under expenditure-based arrangements. This approach may be useful, for example, if a commercial firm that is a participant will not accept an agreement with all of the post-award requirements of an expenditure-based award. Before using a fixed-support arrangement for that firm's portion of the project, you must judge that it meets the criteria in § 37.305.

(a) If a participant has Federal procurement contracts that are subject to the Cost Accounting Standards (CAS) in part 30 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the associated FAR Appendix (48 CFR part 30 and 48 CFR 9903.201-1, respectively), you must alert the participant during the pre-award negotiations to the potential for a CAS violation, as well as the cognizant administrative contracting officer (ACO) for the participant's procurement contracts, if you learn that the participant plans to account differently for its own share and the Federal Government's share of project costs under the TIA. This may arise, for example, if a for-profit firm or other organization subject to the FAR cost principles in 48 CFR parts 31 and 231 proposes to charge:

(1) Its share of project costs as independent research and development (IR&D) costs to enable recovery of the costs through Federal Government procurement contracts, as allowed under the FAR cost principles; and

(2) The Federal Government's share to the project, rather than as IR&D costs.

(b) The reason for alerting the participant and the ACO is that the inconsistent charging of the two shares could cause a noncompliance with Cost Accounting Standard (CAS) 402. Noncompliance with CAS 402 is a potential issue only for a participant that has CAS-covered Federal procurement contracts (note that CAS requirements do not apply to a for-profit participant's TIAs).

(c) For for-profit participants with CAS-covered procurement contracts, the cognizant ACO in most cases will be an individual within the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). You can identify a cognizant ACO at the DCMA by querying the contract administration team locator that matches contractors with their ACOs (currently on the World Wide Web at http://alerts.dcmdw.dcma.mil/support, a site that also can be accessed through the DCMA home page at http://www.dcma.mil).

(a) If you select the milestone payment method (see § 37.805), you must assess the reasonableness of the estimated amount for reaching each milestone. This assessment enables you to set the amount of each milestone payment to approximate the Federal share of the anticipated resource needs for carrying out that phase of the research effort.

(b) The Federal share at each milestone need not be the same as the Federal share of the total project. For example, you might deliberately set payment amounts with a larger Federal share for early milestones if a project involves a start-up company with limited resources.

(c) For an expenditure-based TIA, if you have minimum percentages that you want the recipient's cost sharing to be at the milestones, you should indicate those percentages in the agreement or in separate instructions to the post-award administrative agreements officer. That will help the administrative agreements officer decide when a project's expenditures have fallen too far below the original projections, requiring adjustments of future milestone payment amounts (see § 37.1105(c)).

(d) For fixed-support TIAs, the milestone payments should be associated with the well-defined, observable and verifiable technical outcomes (e.g., demonstrations, tests, or data analysis) that you establish for the project in accordance with §§ 37.305(a) and 37.560(a).

(a) Recovery of funds refers to the use of the authority in 10 U.S.C. 2371 to include a provision in certain types of agreements, including TIAs, that require a recipient to make payments to the Department of Defense or another Federal agency as a condition of the agreement. Recovery of funds is a good tool in the right circumstances, at the discretion of the agreements officer and the awarding organization, but its purpose is not to augment program budgets. It may be used to recover funds provided to a recipient through a TIA or another Federal procurement or assistance instrument, and the recovery should not exceed the amounts provided. Recovery of funds is distinct from program income, as described in § 37.835.

(b) In accordance with 10 U.S.C. 2371, as implemented by policy guidance from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), the payment amounts may be credited to an existing account of the Department of Defense and used for the same program purposes as other funds in that account.

(c) Before you use the authority to include a provision for recovery of funds, note that 10 U.S.C. 2371 requires you to judge that it would not be feasible or appropriate to use for the research project a standard grant or cooperative agreement (in this instance, a “standard cooperative agreement” means a cooperative agreement without a provision for recovery of funds). You satisfy that 10 U.S.C. 2371 requirement when you judge that execution of the research project warrants inclusion of a provision for recovery of funds.