Potential Erroneous Notices from Grants.gov

Grants.gov is currently investigating an issue that has caused some applicants to receive conflicting status notifications for their submissions.

Grants.gov has described the situation as follows:

• An application will become stalled in the system.
• Not being accepted the first time, the system will attempt to resubmit the application as many as 10 times.
• In the best of cases, the application will be accepted the second time, meaning the applicant will receive one rejection notice then an acceptance E-mail.
• In the worst cases, an applicant might receive additional rejection E-mails before receiving an acceptance E-mail.
• Confounding the worst-case scenario, the E-mails might not be sent in order meaning that an applicant could receive several rejection notices, then an acceptance E-mail, followed by more rejection notices.

Grants.gov is working hard to address this issue. In the meantime, here are some steps you should take if you receive a rejection notice for your submission:

• Carefully review your application to make certain there are no legitimate errors. An erroneous rejection notice looks just like a real one.
• If you cannot identify a legitimate reason for the rejection notice, do the following:
  • Call the Grants.gov Contact Center for advice and to document your issue.
  • Notify the eRA Commons Help Desk if your issues threaten on-time submission.
  • Contact AHRQ's Referral Officer, Gerald Calderone by phone at 301-427-1548 or by E-mail at Gerald.Calderone@ahrq.hhs.gov.
• Keep your rejection and acceptance notices as documentation of your submission.
• Use eRA Commons to track the status of your submission and to view your application.
• Look for and correct any errors identified by the eRA system.
• If you submit your application again before the prior submission is pulled from Grants.gov and processed by the Agency, there is no guarantee that your submission will reach the Agency in order. Give each submission a chance to complete the submission process before retrying, and make sure your final application image properly reflects your most recent submission.
• Viewing your application in eRA Commons is the only way to be certain it has properly reached National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is available for further consideration.

If you experience a problem with Grants.gov and have a submission date through May 1, 2009, please view the following NIH Guide notice: Error-Correction Window Extended for All Electronic Applications with Submission Deadlines through May 1, 2009.

Current as of April 2009

Internet Citation:

Potential Erroneous Notices from Grants.gov. April 2009. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/fund/grantserror.htm