How do research funders make sure their money is spent reasonably?

Question

How do research funders audit where their money is going? Say they give some amount to a professor, after one year the professor didn't produce a thing in his research. How does it work?

It seems very unlikely to me that these funds are run by people who doesn't care if they throw their money like that.

The problem is that some professors are not active at all, they offer really low quality courses, they use the same material, same assignments, etc. You would suspect they are good at their research, but you hear similar things from their students. Still, they continue to receive grants and money from the government !

Answer 1

If the researcher has not produced anything after a year, they will find it difficult to obtain any grants after that, because recent publications are a factor in grant decisions. It would be a great way to stall your career. So researchers tend to try pretty hard to produce something once they receive a grant. Also, there's not that many sources of funding out there, so if you totally waste an agency's grant they might remember it when you apply to them again.

Some grants restrict what they may be used for. You cannot, for example, apply for a grant saying you will research X and then instead research a completely different topic Y. Everything you purchase or pay for with the grant money has to be tabulated and reported to the funding agency. If there's stuff that is obviously not related to the research, there may be various repercussions. It depends on the agency how closely they look at your expenses and how strict they are about judging them.

There are also some grants that are structured in installments. You don't get the whole money right away. You have to meet with the agency's officials periodically (for example yearly or every 6 months) and give them an update on your progress. If they don't like the update, you might not get the rest of the money.

Lastly, there is not necessarily an expectation that results must be produced. Science deals with the unknown, so it's inevitable that sometimes the hypothesis just turns out to be wrong. So many funders take broader view. They accept that there will always be some studies that fail, and it's not necessarily the researcher's fault. At the proposal stage, they try to pick applications that would still produce some useful results even if they failed.

The problem is that some professors are not active at all, they offer really low quality courses, they use the same material, same assignments, etc.

Research grants don't really care about the quality of your courses. They are primarily concerned with research. There are sometimes specialized grants that do also take teaching/outreach into account, and these will of course expect you to provide evidence that your courses are high quality.

Answer 2

First, researchers have to request funds for specific purchases, budgets are usually provided as part of the grant proposal. Rarely can a researcher request substantive funds without a clear purpose. The most open-ended type of funds are "summer salary." This is literally pay for the summer, since most professors aren't paid over those months. If someone wants an academic to work during that period (typically research but could be otherwise), it's common for them to request payment. This is summer salary.

Most researchers don't get research funds deposited into their personal accounts. The funds typically go to the university they work at, and then are disbursed after receipts are shown or through the normal purchasing process at the university.

These processes tend to be extremely bureaucratic with great oversight. For example, timesheets might need to be shown for summer salary to be collected - even if the research has been created and published.