NIH Can Now Tell Your Next Employer What It Found. NOT-OD-26-097 Ends the Departure Loophole — and Makes Award Portability Contingent on a Clean Investigation Record.
August 29, 2026 · 8 min read
Granted Research Team · Editorial policy
For nine years, the single most reliable way to end a harassment investigation at a research institution was for the respondent to resign.
The file closed. No findings were entered. No conclusions were documented. The next institution received a neutral dates-of-employment reference, hired the investigator, and — critically — accepted the transfer of their NIH awards without ever learning that an investigation had been open. The research community has a name for this. NIH now has a statute against it.
On August 12, 2026, NIH posted NOT-OD-26-097, "Recent Updates: Supporting a Safe and Respectful Workplace at Institutions that Receive NIH Funding." The notice is short. What it implements is not: provisions of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (Public Law 119-75), signed February 3, 2026, which expanded NIH's authority over harassment, bullying, retaliation, and hostile working conditions involving senior/key personnel on NIH-funded activities.
Three changes matter, and each one moves a piece of institutional practice that has been stable since NIH's 2019 reporting framework took hold.
Change one: the investigation obligation survives the resignation
The operative language is unambiguous. An individual's separation from the institution — by resignation, termination, or non-renewal — does not, by itself, end the institution's obligation to investigate, reach findings, and document conclusions regarding possible misconduct that occurred during NIH-funded activities.
Read that as a compliance requirement, not an aspiration. If a PD/PI or senior/key person on an NIH award is under investigation for workplace conduct and resigns mid-process, the recipient institution must complete the investigation anyway.
This is a genuine operational shift. Most institutional investigation procedures are written around an employment relationship: the respondent participates because they are an employee, evidence is compelled through employment policy, and the sanction is an employment action. When the employment relationship ends, the procedural scaffolding usually collapses, and general counsel typically advises closing the matter — there is no remedy to impose and continuing creates defamation exposure.
That advice is now in tension with a term of award. Institutions need a documented pathway for completing an investigation when the respondent is a former employee: how testimony is obtained without compulsion, what evidentiary standard applies, how findings are recorded when the respondent declines to participate, and who signs the conclusion.
The practical fix is a written post-separation investigation protocol with a defined evidentiary standard and an explicit statement that a respondent's non-participation does not bar a finding. Institutions that do not build this will face a choice between two bad outcomes: closing a file in violation of an award term, or improvising a process that a respondent's counsel will later attack.
Change two: NIH may share findings across institutions
Under PL 119-75, NIH may share investigation reports, conclusions, and the results of any investigation related to harassment, bullying, retaliation, or hostile working conditions with any institution receiving a grant, cooperative agreement, or other extramural award — on a need-to-know basis when necessary to evaluate a funding decision or assess risk.
This is the provision with the longest reach, and it is the one most institutions have not yet absorbed.
Until now, the information asymmetry ran entirely one direction. An institution reported to NIH; NIH held the information; the information did not come back out. A hiring institution conducting reference checks on a senior recruit had no mechanism to learn what NIH had been told about that person by a prior employer, and prior employers — bound by settlement agreements, neutral-reference policies, and defamation risk — had every incentive not to volunteer it.
The statute creates a federal channel that routes around the settlement agreement. NIH is not bound by a private separation agreement between an institution and a former employee. If NIH holds a report and a funding decision at a second institution turns on it, the statute contemplates disclosure.
Two practical consequences follow:
For hiring institutions: the reference check is no longer the only source of truth, and "we had no way to know" is a weaker position than it was in 2025. Institutions recruiting senior investigators with active NIH portfolios should expect that relevant conduct information can surface during the award transfer process rather than during the search.
For institutions writing separation agreements: a neutral-reference clause cannot bind NIH. Drafting one that implies the institution can suppress information NIH already holds — or that NIH will independently acquire — creates a representation the institution cannot honor. Counsel should be revising template language now.
Change three: NIH may refuse to transfer the award
The third provision is the enforcement mechanism that makes the other two bite. NIH may decline to transfer ongoing awards to a new institution if concerns about misconduct remain unresolved.
Award portability is the central currency of senior faculty recruiting. A recruited investigator's negotiating position rests substantially on the portfolio they bring; a change-of-institution transfer (the relinquishing statement and Type 7 sequence) has historically been an administrative formality once both institutions and the program officer agree.
That formality now has a conduct gate. An unresolved investigation at the relinquishing institution is a reason NIH can decline the transfer — which means the recruiting institution has hired an investigator whose funding did not follow them.
This changes the risk allocation in a recruitment negotiation. Start-up packages are sized against expected award continuity. If continuity is contingent on the resolution of a matter at the prior institution that the recruiting institution cannot see, inspect, or influence, the recruiting institution is underwriting an unpriced risk.
The 30-day notification rule, precisely
The reporting trigger itself is not new, but it is worth restating exactly, because institutions still miss it.
When an individual identified as PD/PI or senior/key personnel in an NIH Notice of Award is removed from their position or otherwise disciplined due to concerns about harassment, bullying, retaliation, or hostile working conditions, the Authorized Organization Representative must notify NIH within 30 days.
Notification goes through the dedicated eRA web form, "Inform NIH About Harassment or Discrimination Concerns," and must include at minimum:
| Required element | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name of the submitting AOR | Institutional official, not the investigator or the complainant |
| Name of the individual of concern | The respondent |
| Description of the concern(s) | Nature of the allegation |
| Action(s) taken | Removal, suspension, restriction of duties, other discipline |
| Anticipated impact on NIH-funded award(s) | Effort changes, PI substitution, delays |
Three details institutions get wrong:
"Or otherwise disciplined" is broader than termination. A written warning that restricts a PI's supervisory role over trainees is discipline. So is a mandated lab-management plan imposed as a sanction. The trigger is not "did we fire them," it is "did we discipline them for conduct in this category."
The clock runs from the action, not from the conclusion of appeals. Thirty days from the removal or disciplinary action. An internal appeal that runs 90 days does not toll the reporting requirement.
Only NOA-listed PD/PI and senior/key personnel trigger it. A postdoc, a lab manager, or a staff scientist not named on the Notice of Award is not covered by the notification requirement — though the underlying investigation obligation, and the separate prior-approval disclosure practice for senior/key personnel changes, still apply.
Separately, and since 2020: prior approval requests for changes in PD/PI or senior/key personnel should state whether the change relates to concerns about safety or work environment. That box is where a substantial share of NIH's actual visibility comes from, and it is answered by research administrators who often do not know the answer. Build a routing step that asks HR before the prior-approval request goes out.
What institutions must be able to demonstrate
The notice frames institutional obligations as conditions of award, applicable across grants, cooperative agreements, and other extramural awards including Other Transactions. Recipients must be able to show:
- Prompt response and thorough investigation procedures
- Accessible reporting processes with protection against retaliation
- Clear codes of professional conduct
- Regular employee awareness of applicable laws and policies
- Completion of investigations even after a respondent departs
The requirements land in NIHGPS Section 8.1.2.6 for FY 2026, with related material in Section 4. That placement matters: it is a term and condition of award, enforceable through the ordinary remedies for noncompliance in 2 CFR 200.339 — including specific conditions, suspension, and, at the extreme, termination.
The uncomfortable incentive
There is a structural tension in this design that institutions should name internally rather than discover in a deposition.
Reporting a disciplined PI to NIH now carries a heavier consequence than it did in 2025: the information may be shared with other institutions and may block that PI's future award transfer. That raises the stakes of the institutional decision to characterize a disciplinary action as harassment-related.
The path of least resistance — recharacterizing a conduct-based sanction as a performance matter, a "restructuring," or a mutual separation — avoids the report. It also constitutes a failure to meet a term of award, and it produces a documentary record that will not survive scrutiny if the same investigator generates a complaint at the next institution and a subsequent review reaches back.
Institutions that want to be defensible should decide now, at the policy level, that characterization decisions are made by the office that runs the investigation, not by the office negotiating the separation.
What to do in the next 60 days
Research offices. Confirm you have a named individual responsible for the 30-day eRA notification and that HR knows to route to them. The most common failure mode is not refusal to report — it is that HR resolved the matter and no one told sponsored programs there was an NIH-funded PI involved.
General counsel. Pull your separation agreement template. Any neutral-reference or non-disclosure language that could be read to promise suppression of information NIH holds or may share needs revision.
Investigation offices. Draft the post-separation protocol. Define the evidentiary standard, the procedure when a respondent declines to participate, and who signs findings when there is no employment relationship left to act on.
Faculty affairs and recruiting. Add award-transfer risk to the diligence checklist for senior external hires with active NIH portfolios. Consider making a portion of a start-up commitment contingent on actual transfer of identified awards rather than on their nominal existence.
Individual investigators. If you are negotiating a move and have an unresolved matter at your current institution, the transfer of your awards is no longer administrative. Get it resolved, or price the risk into the negotiation honestly.
The larger pattern
NOT-OD-26-097 is the conduct-side entry in a broader 2026 trend of NIH converting encouragement into award terms. The same year produced the end of continuous submission, the proposed blackout on reported peer review scores, a restructuring of the K award programs, and an RFI on capping simultaneous Research Project Grants per PI.
What distinguishes this one is that Congress wrote it. NIH did not choose the cross-institutional sharing authority or the transfer-refusal power; the appropriations act granted them. That makes NOT-OD-26-097 considerably more durable than a policy notice an incoming administration can withdraw — and it means the compliance investment institutions make now has a longer useful life than most of what else landed in 2026.