How does an IPA work?
If your Fellowship involves an IPA, your salary will be paid by the agency where you work, but you will receive your money from your sponsoring institution. The Federal agency pays the money to your sponsoring institution, and that institution pays you, presumably in the same manner they are currently paying you. This allows the Federal government to receive the benefit of additional employees without having to increase the number of full-time employees (FTE) employed by the Federal government. This is important in a political sense – you may recall in the late 1980s and early 1990s a lot of debate about the need to shrink the Federal government. Through the use of IPAs, the government has been able to keep its count of employees fairly constant throughout the last decade. OF course, IPAs have other purposes, including some that benefit the employee. By temporarily assigning someone to a new position, rather than that person leaving a current job to take a new one, the employee’s emplo
