Information for Approvers
Faculty/Staff Disclosures for External or Internal Activity/Sponsored Research Submission
Online Disclosure Update
As of May 21, 2009, over 3700 disclosure forms have been submitted in the new online disclosure process. Users are adapting to the new process, and we have reached over 600 UAB employees in informational sessions around the campus.
Your role as an approver in this process is most important. The university counts on administrators and their delegates to make informed and thoughtful decisions regarding the nature of consulting activities in your units. The Conflict of Interest Working Group and the IT team are also continuing to work to address philosophical, practical, and technological issues as they arise.
Reports Feature Launched
We are pleased to announce that report writing with advanced features is now available. In addition to the history tab showing your own submissions and your approvals, you should now see a “Reports” tab at the top of the “UAB Forms” screen after you sign into the system. Clicking on this tab will give you options to run “forms lists” and “organization approvers” lists:
• The forms lists allow you to search for disclosure forms by employee name, service/activity/entity name, date ranges, income ranges, or status (approved/rejected/ auto-rejected). This gives you the capability, for example, to search for all faculty members doing consulting for a particular company or to run a report showing all consulting activities yielding a particular income.
• The organization lists show you the approval workflow for orgs over which you have supervision.
You must click on the “View Report” button on the far right side of the screen to generate reports. You may also export reports to a number of formats (Excel, PDF, etc.) by clicking on the drop-down arrow for “Select a format,” choosing your format, and clicking “Export.” This will allow you to save reports on your desktop; it is also the preferred method for printing reports since it will generate a better print view.
All approvers will have access only to data for units for which they are responsible.
Auto-rejections
Please remember that submissions will be auto-rejected after 14 days with no activity from an approver. Both the approver and his/her delegate will receive an email reminder if a submission has not been approved or rejected after 7 days. If you know that you will not have email access or you will be unable to approve forms for two weeks, be sure to alert your delegate of your absence to avoid auto-rejection.
If a form is auto-rejected, the submitter will be allowed to resubmit without creating a new form.
Rejections/editing
If you would like a submitter to edit a form before you approve it, you may reject the form with a note explaining what should be modified. The submitter will be allowed to edit a rejected form and resubmit it for approval.
Junk Mail
A few users are still having trouble with email notifications going to junk mail. To correct this problem, go to your junk mail folder. Right-click on the email header and select “Move to Inbox.” This should resolve future junk mail deliveries for emails from this site.
Training/FAQs
The training PowerPoint and FAQs for the faculty/staff disclosure forms have been moved to a tab at the top of the UAB Forms site. This will allow for more training and FAQ documents to be posted when we add new forms to the site. FAQs for the disclosure forms may also be accessed directly from the form itself by clicking the link above the choices for external or internal activity/sponsored research submission.
Feedback
If you have questions or suggestions, please contact Nancy Wingo at nancy10@uab.edu or 934-9476.