Sir
You report on a National Science Foundation (NSF) audit of Caltech's accounting system in your News story 'Researchers criticized for poor time-keeping' (Nature 449, 512–513; 2007). The audit cited accounting deficiencies, in particular the handling of professorial effort as “voluntary committed cost sharing” as opposed to “voluntary uncommitted cost sharing”. Although faculty and staff were following the Caltech accounting practices that were in place at the time, your News story states that researchers “failed to report this to Caltech's payroll system”. In fact, we did not have that option because of the deficiencies in the system. The audit report did state that “Caltech's responses, once implemented, should address our audit recommendations”.
Although the NSF report discusses interviews and facts related to several principal investigators and their grants, it does not name individuals. Even though the report does not refer to me by name, your News story associates information in the report with me personally. The NSF auditor, Joyce Werking, incorrectly recorded my statements about my time allocation in the report. The statements about me in your article are erroneous, taken out of context and unfair to me. Although Nature did attempt to contact me during the week before going to press, I was away at the time and unable to respond.
Certainly, Caltech and other universities should increase their efforts to align their accounting practices with agency regulations. Also, NSF should improve its methods for gathering and accurately reporting information. And Nature could have presented a more informed, responsible and balanced view.
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McKeown, R. Time: accounting problems caused by Caltech system. Nature 450, 161 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/450161b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/450161b