As a faculty member I find it more and more difficult to use my own grant funding (some of which is from organizations like NSF and some of which is "unrestricted gift" funding, which is supposed to be used at my sole discretion.) Mostly this is due to new rules and reporting requirements that rule out certain expenses, and some of it is new procedures that make reimbursement harder.
For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.
I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.
For example, we were informed last year that we couldn't buy pizza for grad students' research lab meetings because the business office had determined that "food purchased within 100 miles of the University" was no longer a valid business expense. Similarly, travel booking has become much more difficult and many of my colleagues (and grad students) report large sums of un-reimbursed expenses, just because the process of getting things through the system is so much more byzantine now.
I don't want to complain too much, but all these "small" new requirements add up: particularly the ones that require office staff to manually approve expenditures (our office is understaffed.) It is definitely making it harder for us to do our jobs, and some faculty and students are so frustrated with the procedures that they spend their own salaries to get work done.