Lakshya raj khatri
Eugenio Pescimoro
PROLOY TARAN DAS
Reimbursement of Expenses...
11 Comments
Hi Sofia,
I am actually a post-doc and I have an individual fellowship which foresees a training budget of 9600 euro per year. That's why I am asking if some one of you experienced something similar. Unfortunately I know that for PhD students those type of expenses are not reimbursed.
Hi Sofia,
I am actually a post-doc and I have an individual fellowship which foresees a training budget of 9600 euro per year. That's why I am asking if some one of you experienced something similar. Unfortunately I know that for PhD students those type of expenses are not reimbursed.
Hi Margherita,
I am sorry to read that. I have never had problems claiming expenses. Have you attached all receipts to your expenses claim forms? Which reason did they mention for not reimbursing the money?
A.
Hi Margherita,
I am not sure if you can claim a double rent with the Marie Curie, but there is one thing you can do: the tax declaration (Steuererklaerung) in Germany.
There you can indicate the moving costs (Umzugskosten) to Denmark you did not get back from the Marie Curie. This can be any cost related to moving (flight and bus tickets, sending parcels, cleaning costs for the flat you are leaving, letting agency costs etc.) and also the double rent (doppelte Miete). Since you had more expenses, you are likely to get taxes back. It is surely worth doing the tax declaration, I did it several times when I was living in Germany.
There is one thing though: you are receiving the mobility allowance (is it taxed or not taxed?) and this should also be considered as a refund for the moving costs. So maybe the costs of the trip to Denmark should be claimed as work trip costs not moving costs (if the mobility allowance already covers them). It is probably good if you could get a tax adviser to help you with that.
In any case if you had work-related costs you did not get refunded you are able to put them in the tax declaration and get taxes back.
All the best,
Maria Paola
Hi Sofia,
since you don't say anything about why the university refuses to reimburse you more, it is difficult to say anything about your case. At least in the case of Marie-Curie post-doctoral grants, fellows should be able to use the funds rather freely as long as they stay within the rules. So in order to deny reimbursement, your university would have to tell you what rules they basing their decision on.
If it helps, I can state that in the case of my Marie-Curie IOF, I have successfully claimed rent and travel costs for an extended trip to California, not out of the mobility allowance but out of the training costs because that trip was part of my work plan to get training. Now, an important detail is that the main location of my IOF is not California but Canada. I have not even tried to claim the rent for my stay in Canada because I have subket my apartment in Sweden during the two years that I am abroad so that the rent in Canada is not an extra cost but simply my main rent that I would pay anyway (if the rent is higher abroad, the mobility allowance is supposed to cover that). The rent in California was an additional cost because it did not make sense to give up my apartment in Canada fro those two months. And I have a confirmation from the ERA that in such cases it is entirely possible to claim back the costs for rent, provided that the trip is part of the work plan. Basically, it is like claiming the hotel costs when attending a conference.
Good luck,
Christoph
Dear Cristoph,
Thank you very much for sharing your experience. The fact is that the secondment I did is a training, since it was foreseen in the project since the proposal. The university has applied this rule that the only amount which is refundable is 800 euro/month, which means that if the training is 6 months the only amount refundable is 4800. Unfortunately my expenses double this amount (only for accommodation, travel and per diem) since Denmark it is a very expensive country and rate of exchange are crazy. Now the fact is that for one year I have available as training budget 9600 euro. It is incredible for me bvecause otherwise, according to this rule, I could not go to any conference since all expenses are largely higher than 800 euro per month.
I do not know what to do. I will try to ocntact the project officer but I doubt that they can do anything in this regard. I was hoping that there was some regulation according to which the amount of training budget for one year should be fully available and not restricted.
Thank you very much
Margherita
Dear Margherita,
the claim of your university that they are only allowed to pay out 800 per month is utter nonsense. It seems to me (also from my own experience) that university administrators are so scared of the EU auditors that they invent all kinds of restrictions to make sure that they will not have any problems with the EU. This is ironic because one of the main reasons why the EU is checking the use of their funds so closely is to make sure that the universities spend all the money to the benefit of the researcher (rather than trying to keep some for themselves). You should have no problem obtaining a statement from the ERA (or perhaps even the national contact point) saying that the 800 per month "rule" is just a rule to determine the total amount of the grant and not at all a rule about how much can be spent per month. If you want, you can spend it all in one month, as long as it makes sense in your work plan. But before getting that statement, make sure your university admin agrees to reimburse you if you can prove that they are allowed to do so.
Good luck,
Christoph
Dear Cristoph,
I totally agree with you. I will fight until the very end for which I believe is my right in this context. Otherwise there is no prestige in being awarded with this fellowship.
I will also take your advice and write to REA. The statement you required, did you ask directly your Project Officer? Or is there any other contact? Unfortunately the national contact point, many times redirected me to my research officer which is the one creating the mess, so it's basically useless.
Thank you very much in advance.
I contacted REA to help me out last month (there's a thread here somewhere about it). They redirected me to the UK contact office, and they back to HR at my university. So, not very useful. Maybe the Union could help?¿
A.
well, my impression is that EC tends to stay more on institution side than looking after researchers. but this comes from my personal experience. I have to admit that the first year of this grant was very stressful. Research office since the beginning was very harsh and not helpful at all. And now for something completely different....the failed reimbursed for a secondment foreseen in the project plan since the submission of the proposal. So, nothing they did not know before.
I really hope that there are different insitutions were working environment is diffrent. I was completely satisfied with the institute and supervisor though.
Reimbursment of expenses for a secondment for a Marie Curie PhD? I think you should already consider yourself very lucky that you got 4800 back. In my network (NABBA) we asked many time to have reimbursed our expenses for the secondment, because someone was getting them, but most of us gets nothing. We have to pay everything by ourselves. The coordinator showed us that unfortunately there is no part of our scholarship that can be used to reimburse expenses for long secondments (more than 3 months); those of us that got money were just lucky that the professor was so kind to cover their expenses with his own fund, or he used money from the personal NABBA fund of the fellow, but anyway up to a certain amount (I think it was no more than 1000/month, as a forfait)