Excerpt: “[National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)] carries out its mission by providing financial assistance to partner institutions through three primary funding mechanisms: competitive grants, capacity grants, and non-competitive grants. NIFA is responsible for administering the AFRI, which is the Nation’s flagship competitive grants program for research, education, and extension projects in the food and agricultural sciences. We determined that NIFA designed adequate controls over the peer and merit review system when selecting AFRI grant recipients. We did not identify any issues during fieldwork to indicate that controls were not adequately implemented to properly select applicants based on merit. We found that NIFA did not effectively monitor any of the 51 started AFRI grants we sampled, as the agency did not adequately review grantees’ progress and financial reports, timely close out grants, or timely deobligate unused grant funding. In addition, NIFA did not timely complete required grantee compliance reviews.”
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