08 / 03 / 2022
EARTO members very much appreciate the efforts of the European Institutions to preserve continuity in the Framework Programmes’ (FPs) implementation as much as possible within the new Model Grant Agreement’s (MGA) and Annotated Grant Agreement’s (AGA) Corporate Approach. EARTO remains fully committed to actively contribute to preparing Horizon Europe’s implementation. Even though not legally binding, the AGA is an essential document supporting beneficiaries’ sound understanding and proper application of the rules set in the MGA. EARTO has already contributed to the MGA and AGA making with detailed analysis of the different draft MGA and AGA versions, and with technical papers on key topics (see EARTO papers on Personnel Costs, Internal Invoices, Open Science & IPR, among others).
Based on its members’ expertise, EARTO hereby made a new analysis of the European Commission’s (EC) Pre-draft AGA 0.2 proposal (version from November 2021). First and foremost, EARTO would like to thank the EC services for taking EARTO earlier comments into consideration when preparing this new AGA version. This new AGA version will certainly help beneficiaries to understand the new rules for participation of Horizon Europe. Accordingly, EARTO very much welcomes that:
In addition, EARTO would like to point out two main areas that could be further simplified to support proper application by beneficiaries avoiding adding possibilities of calculations’ errors:
EARTO experts would also like to point out that new challenges will arise in future implementation of EU RD&I related programmes. Indeed, while EARTO very much appreciated the further investments made in RD&I related topics in the new MFF (for which EARTO supported the EU Institutions in the last budgetary negotiations), the multiplication of independent EU RD&I funding programmes having each a different set of rules of participation will bring challenges to both the EU institutions, member states as well as beneficiaries (i.e. Horizon Europe, Defence, Space, Health, Digital & Regional programmes). This will bring a new level of complexity for beneficiaries to manage the participation in each of these funds. We expect this will be a key challenge the European institutions, member states and the beneficiaries will have to face together. Accordingly, EARTO and its experts remain ready to further share their experiences with the EU institutions in order to find common solutions to the upcoming implementation’s challenges.
Read the full EARTO Analysis of Horizon Europe Pre-Draft AGA – Financial Aspects