Special Service Facility
From Jay Dominick's Wiki
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Special Service Facility
A Special Service Facility is basically a recharge unit that has revenue of over $1M per year. An SFS that has been approved by the cognizant federal agency (in our case HHS)is able to charge Federal Grants directly for the services it provides.
At the Direction of Vice Chancellor Hardin, a task force has been created to evaluate whether or not ITS should charge for services. In government-speak, the decision is whether ITS should be in the Overhead rate (as it always has been) or whether it should be a Special Service Facility.
Recharge Task Force
The committee consists of:
- Pat Barber (ITS)
- Mark Clemens (FITSAC Chair, Biology)
- Jay Dominick (ITS, Chair)
- Larry Mays (Bioinformatics)
- Dale Pike (COLAS)
- Steve Selby (ORSP)
- Jack Stein (Engineering)
Task Force Minutes
Issues For Consideration
- Does it make any sense to charge for services? Is the increased overhead worth the trouble?
- If ITS charges for service, how does the customer have input into quality of the service and what options are there if the service costs too much or isn't good?
- What do you charge for?
- How will the departments that get charged get money to pay for the services?
Recommendation
The committee recommended that ITS not be included in the F&A rate during the renegotiation. It isn’t needed in order to achieve the maximum reimbursement rate and by leaving it out we retain maximum flexibility in implementing a chargeback scheme or not. We further recommend that a group be created and charged with assessing the possible creation of a Recharge unit including addressing the following questions:
- What is the strategic necessity to do this? What benefit would the Service Center bring to campus in terms of both short and long term infrastructure improvements that would warrant the extra cost of implementing and maintaining something like this?
- What types of behaviors should the charging algorithm reward and what should it penalize?
- What are some potential scenarios for ITS?
- What service lines would be included?
- Which charging model should be used?
- Should there be a short term solution for some recovery next FY?
- What is the plan for engaging the campus stakeholders in the decision making process?
- Timeline for completing the analysis.
Follow Up
The ITS department was not included in the F&A rate calculation that was submitted to the Federal Government in the Spring of 2009.
UNC General Administration commissioned a working group of CIOs under the leadership of Larry Conrad at UNC Chapel Hill to look at the issue of funding for infrastructure replacement. Many of the campuses are seeing the same basic problems with funding that we are and are also looking at different solutions.