FFATA details mean changes ahead

Those of you who witnessed the June 19th FFATA webcast hosted at HUD may be interested in what this means for the applicant community. (Sadly this good presentation was marred by the lack of call-in participation due to technical difficulties. You can give your feedback here.)

This is how FFATA works in the simple: the Federal agencies will connect their back office systems to a big public searchable database starting this year. This means that all of the information will be coming from agency systems. Some information, however, will originate with your applications to Grants.gov. Here is a link to what OMB wants to see in this database.

We emailed in our questions during the presentation, which were answered promptly during the meeting:

    To comply with FFATA:

    Will there be changes to the SF-424RR formset? If so, when?

    Will there be changes to the SF-424 formset? If so, when?

The answers were, yes, we don’t know, yes, we don’t know, respectively. For the applicant community this means that the base forms will change. These changes have a wide variety of implications for the System-to-System developer community, as we will need to release changes to the software to accommodate the new forms (what S2Sers would describe as “new XML schema” as for the SF-424RR.)

Finally, there continues to be the ongoing conflicts of schedule between the freeze of forms changes caused by the changeover to Adobe and the mandatory changes to the forms caused by FFATA this year. Not quite a perfect storm…

Comments

[Charisse Carney-Nunes]

Thank you for the positive feedback on the June 19th webcast presentation and for the constructive comment about the technical difficulties. We are working hard to ensure that these problems are not encountered during our next webcast scheduled for Oct. 30th. In the meantime, your readers should know that the June 19th webcast is still available for on demand viewing, and we have extended the period for comments and questions in light of the technical problems. To view the on-demand webcast, go to http://grants.gov/aboutgrants/grants_news.jsp, and to submit a question or comment, email GPCWebcast@nsf.gov.

Sincerely,
Charisse Carney-Nunes
Senior Staff Associate for Tom Cooley, GPC Chair