Pre-Award Proposal Compliance & Quality Assurance
Compliance-check NSF and NIH proposals before submission
What You Can Do
This skill systematically reviews your research proposal against funder requirements, institutional policies, and compliance checkpoints to identify issues before submission. It validates proposal structure, budget justifications, and timelines while flagging common violations that could trigger desk rejections or revision requests. You'll receive a detailed compliance report with specific issues, severity levels, and actionable remediation steps for each funder type.
Features
Checks your proposal against specific requirements from NSF, NIH, DOE, and other federal sponsors. Validates page limits, formatting, required sections, and funder-specific guidelines.
Ensures your proposal meets your institution's internal policies for cost-sharing, indirect costs, conflict of interest disclosure, and approval workflows.
Generates a checklist of all compliance items specific to your funder and institution. Tracks completion status and highlights incomplete items requiring attention.
Identifies common submission mistakes that trigger desk rejections or revision requests, such as missing budget justifications, unclear timelines, or policy violations.
Validates that personnel costs, equipment purchases, travel, and indirect costs are properly justified and comply with funder cost-sharing and allowability rules.
Prioritizes findings by severity (Critical, High, Medium, Low) so you focus on blocking issues first before minor formatting corrections.
Reviews the same proposal against multiple funder requirements simultaneously, highlighting where policies conflict and which funder has the strictest rules.
Provides specific, actionable fix recommendations for each flagged issue, including example text or budget recalculations where applicable.
Example Output
NSF CAREER Award Proposal - Compliance Report
- ✅ Critical Issues: 0
- ⚠️ High Priority: 2
- 📋 Medium Priority: 5
High Priority Issues:
- Missing Broader Impacts Statement: NSF CAREER awards require dedicated broader impacts narrative. Your proposal currently has no separate section. Recommendation: Add 1-2 page section describing education, outreach, and societal impact.
- Budget Justification Incomplete: Personnel costs lack hourly rates for graduate students. NSF guidelines require explicit calculations. Recommendation: Add "Graduate students at $XX/hour × YY hours = $ZZ"
Medium Priority Issues:
- Project Timeline: Milestone for "System implementation" lacks specific deliverables. Break into concrete checkpoints (e.g., "Complete API v1.0 by Month 6")
- References formatting: 3 references use non-standard citation format. NSF prefers author-date style.
- Biographical Sketch: One Co-Investigator entry is 2.5 pages (NSF limit is 2 pages).
Institution Policy Check:
- ✅ Passes your institution's 15% cost-sharing requirement (proposal specifies 16% university contribution)
- ✅ All Co-Investigators have completed conflict-of-interest disclosure
What's Included
- Compliance Validation Workflow: Step-by-step process to review your proposal against a comprehensive compliance matrix covering funder rules, policies, and best practices.
- Pre-Built Funder Templates: Ready-made compliance checklists and requirement matrices for NSF, NIH, DOE, USDA, and other common federal sponsors. Easily customizable for your institution.
- Institutional Policy Integration: Framework to input your university's cost-sharing policies, indirect cost rates, approval workflows, and compliance requirements. Reusable across proposals.
- Automated Red-Flag Detection: Patterns and checks that flag common proposal mistakes (missing sections, budget inconsistencies, unrealistic timelines) before human review.
- Severity-Ranked Issue Triage: Issues categorized by impact: Critical (blocks submission), High (likely revision requests), Medium (best practice), Low (cosmetic). Focus your effort accordingly.
- Detailed Remediation Guidance: Specific fix recommendations for each issue, including example language, budget recalculation templates, and funder-specific best practices.
Who It's For
- Faculty and Principal Investigators
- Research Administrators and Grants Managers
- Institutional Compliance Officers
- Department Research Support Staff
Best For
- NSF proposal preparation and compliance checks
- NIH grant applications and budget justification review
- DOE, USDA, and multi-agency federal funding submissions
- Pre-submission institutional compliance audits
- Multi-institutional collaborative proposals
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