Universities push for aligned EU and national audits

National R&D funders and future EU funding programmes should use the same set of standards and processes to check up on grantees, the European University Association has said.

In a policy paper published on 29 August during a public consultation on the EU’s planned 2021-27 Horizon Europe R&D programme, the EUA said that making auditing and funding frameworks match up would save time for funders and their beneficiaries.

Enora Pruvot and Veronika Kupriyanova, the authors of the paper, suggested introducing a compatibility check that would eventually allow beneficiaries to have their costs automatically duplicated across national and European reporting systems.