Higher education institutions face increasing demands to balance compliance, operational efficiency, and financial management. Maximus provides the expertise and tools to help you streamline administrative processes, manage risk, and optimize financial outcomes—so you can focus on your mission of educating and supporting students.
We offer you everything you need to maximize facilities and administrative rates using our industry-leading software and consulting services.
Customized support for your institution’s existing or future service center. Trust us to help you design and implement a service center for your institution that is effective, efficient and compliant.
Recent federal audits have resulted in large monetary settlements at a significant number of institutions. The growing complexity and volume of federal regulations (e.g., 2 CFR) further complicates your efforts to comply.
Our services include transitional staff operations support, organizational review, business process review, and compliance risk assessments which can help leadership understand the organization’s service weaknesses and risk.
Strategic Asset Management Services Offerings, Including the Physical Inventory/Verification of your organizations: Land, Infrastructure, Land Improvements, Buildings/Building Services, and Moveable Equipment for Asset Management and Financial Reporting Purposes.
Our proprietary web-based solution and related consulting services help central and academic departments comply with increasingly complex federal regulations surrounding effort reporting and managing effort commitments.
We offer a variety of workshops and our Annual Meeting that enable you to hear presentations from university experts and Maximus staff, meet and interact with peers from other institutions, and earn CPE credits.
Learn more about our eventsMaximus can assist you with a qualitative and quantitative assessment of your organization’s sponsored program enterprise, plans for strategic expansion, and capacity enhancement.
Our Comprehensive Rate Information System® (CRIS®), now available on a sophisticated .NET platform, automates the F&A rate calculation to assist you with the preparation of your F&A proposal. Offering flexible levels of support, our experts perform complex analyses in CRIS® to maximize your reimbursement. Full outsource services are also offered where we load the University data into CRIS® and prepare the Proposal.
Working closely with your staff to ensure your proposal is of the highest quality, we provide technical-level data support, as well as direction and strategy specific to proposal methodology. We also offer custom work plans and timelines to assist in that process.
To increase the quality of your F&A proposal, our CRIS® experts analyze your CRIS® models and review the efforts of your staff to complete the space survey and the proposal. This is accomplished through diagnostic and critical reviews of your F&A proposal.
Our experienced negotiators can assist you in attaining excellent F&A rates. Our professionals negotiate over a dozen F&A proposals each year with varied rate increases for a number of institutions. We have negotiated in and have good working relationships with all four HHS-DCA regions and ONR-DCAA.
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We assist you in conducting a space functionalization survey, utilizing the same methodology used by the Federal Government. We prepare instructions, develop definitions, conduct department training sessions and complete quality control reviews to assure your space survey is defensible. Our WebSpace® system allows you to select the rooms to survey, establish roles for department and central administrators, incorporate payroll data, substantiate survey results and review a variety of reports summarizing the survey status and results.
When you conduct your own survey, we review the survey to improve its acceptability to the Federal Government. Our staff can show you where your space surveys are likely to be challenged and how to defend these challenges, reducing unwelcome surprises during negotiations. We also perform the same Base-Space review and analysis, utilizing CRIS® reports, as is done by the Federal Government.
WebSpace provides institutions with a tool to facilitate the space survey process, free-up the institution's resources for other tasks, and produce a defensible space survey that will ultimately maximize the negotiation of F&A rates. WebSpace can also be used to meet state requirements pertaining to space information.
Learn More"Thank you for all your guidance, support and advice during the past year in the installation of the CRIS software and the development of the University of Pittsburgh's practice year Facilities and Administrative rate proposal. When questions and problems came up, you were readily able to respond with technical answers and practical solutions. Your visits to our campus were very productive and highly informative."Mark StofkoUniversity of Pittsburgh Director, Research and Cost Accounting
Our effort reporting experts assist higher education institutions in the development of effort reporting policies, procedures and systems. We have an in-house staff of technical experts, with experience in the development and implementation of systems, who can help you develop or improve your effort reporting process or system. Our functional staff members have many years of effort reporting experience in research institutions and can help your institution develop policies and procedures to strengthen your compliance initiatives. Our experienced team also provides training for your management and staff on the nuances and intricacies of effort reporting.
In our evaluation, we cover major high-risk areas identified in federal reviews and inspector general audits. Our work plan includes over 170 evaluation items and will deliver a comprehensive report on compliance areas, numerical ranking, and specific recommendations. We provide fast and confidential results, with project cycles typically lasting four to eight weeks. We address the top ten non-compliance issues, including direct charging, effort certification, cost transfers, and budget revisions.
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Our effort reporting experts assist higher education institutions in the development of effort reporting policies, procedures and systems. We have an in-house staff of technical experts, with experience in the development and implementation of systems, who can help you develop or improve your effort reporting process or system. Our functional staff members have many years of effort reporting experience in research institutions and can help your institution develop policies and procedures to strengthen your compliance initiatives. Our experienced team also provides training for your management and staff on the nuances and intricacies of effort reporting.
If your institution currently depreciates its buildings over a 40, 50, or 60-year life, you are probably not maximizing your potential depreciation benefits. Building Componentization allows you to adjust the average asset lives from say, 60 years to perhaps 20 to 30 years, thus accelerating your depreciation and increasing F&A reimbursement. Additionally, with periodic/ongoing building renovations, new PI’s occupying new space, the lifing of these assets due to renovations, improvements, or betterments, could be significant and should be accurately reported.
Maximus will perform a Building Componentization study in accordance with OMB 2 CFR 200 of your research-intensive buildings (Organized research activities of a defined percentage of Organized Research activities) by accurately identifying and segregating construction and renovation costs into the OMB designated cost reporting groups below:
| Building Envelope | HVAC System | Laboratory Benches and Cabinetry |
| Exterior/Interior Construction | Plumbing System | Exhaust/Fume Hoods |
| Roof Framing | Emergency Power Support Systems | Emergency Eye Wash/Shower Stations |
| Building Foundation | Fire protection System | Fixed Auditorium Seating |
| Below Ground Infrastructure Systems | Electrical System | Vivarium Support Equipment |
| Elevators/Escalators | Sterilizers / Glassware Washers |
While we are componentizing the building structures, we also perform a formal lifing analysis of the Building Shell, Building Services, and Fixed Equipment Asset classifications via an interview process with your facilities department to arrive at individual lives, “based upon institutional experience,” consistent with OMB 2 CFR 200.
We will perform a Physical Space Inventory of all buildings where significant Organized Research/Other Sponsored Activities take place.
This space inventory will include the following tasks:
Having an accurate inventory of your Moveable/Fixed Equipment Assets and identifying these assets to the Building/Floor, Department and Room level is very important. This effort will allow your institution to comply with the OMB 2 CFR 200 bi-annual inventory requirements, comply with asset stewardship requirements for Federally Funded assets, allow for asset screening requirements to avoid duplicate asset purchases, and bring the asset depreciation to the room level to maximize your deprecation by research function for F&A reporting purposes.
For this effort, we will conduct a complete wall-to-wall physical inventory with barcode/RFID asset tagging services on a room-by-room basis, of your moveable and fixed equipment with little to no disruption to ongoing research activities. We will verify the Building, Floor, Department, and Room Number for each location included in our proposed study. We will scan each current barcode asset tag affixed to each asset, that meets your current capitalization policy of $5,000, and greater. If an asset is not currently tagged at the time of our inventory, we will affix a new tag to those assets. Once these assets are scanned, we will also verify the Building, Floor, Room, Department, Asset Description, Model, Manufacturer, and Serial Number data fields for each asset scanned. In the event an asset was relocated from its previous location, we will update the new location of the transferred asset.
At the conclusion of our inventory, we will reconcile the “new” physical inventory to the “current” inventory that your institution maintains and provide you with the following reconciliation reports:
It is important to note that every entity must have current formal Asset Management Policies and Procedures in place that are subject to Internal/Independent, as well as State & Federal cognizant auditor review.
Maximus can review your Fixed Asset policies and procedures, as well as your Real Property facilities construction policies and procedures. This service will include a review of your institution's acquisition, capitalization, updating, and disposition Policies & Procedures associated with your Moveable/Fixed Equipment Assets. Additionally, with this effort, we will review your institution's Buildings (Real Property) Policies & Procedures to include Renovations/Improvements, Capitalization Policies for Improvements/Betterments vs ongoing Maintenance/Repairs, Acquisition/Donations of Buildings vs Construction, and Improvements to Leased property.
Insurers, Brokers, and Underwriters rely on accurate moveable equipment and real property data for insurance risk management reporting purposes. Underreported, or inflated insurable property values could possibly result in payment of inaccurate premiums, which can result in inadequate insurance coverage in the event of a catastrophic loss.
Our service offering can support your institution's Risk Manager with accurate replacement costs and asset documentation for insurance placement requirements with current/accurate asset values. In the event of a loss, we can provide “Proof of Loss” services as part of our Insurance Valuation Services.