FY 2023 Intellectual Property Enforcement Program: Protecting Public Health, Safety, and the Economy from Counterfeit Goods and Product Piracy

Transcript also available as a PDF.

DARYL FOX: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, “FY 2023 Intellectual Property Enforcement Program: Protecting Public Health, Safety, and the Economy from Counterfeit Goods and Product Piracy,” hosted by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. At this time, it's my pleasure to introduce David P. Lewis, Senior Policy Adviser with the Bureau of Justice Assistance for some welcoming remarks and to begin the presentation. David?

DAVID P. LEWIS: Thank you, Daryl. It's my privilege to be here today to talk about the IPEP program that we affectionately call it, kind of our short acronym. But before I get into the presentation itself, I just want to talk a little bit about the Office of Justice Programs and the Bureau of Justice Assistance. What our job is here at OJP and BJA, as you see on there, it's grant funding, training, research, and statistics to the criminal justice community. As you can see, we're made up of several different offices. On the right, you see on the right-hand graphic. We're probably one of the largest grant-making organizations for the Department of Justice. And the other ones are the Office on Violence Against Women and the Office of Community Oriented Policing or the COPS office. And so the Bureau of Justice Assistance, our mission statement on there. And you see on the right also, I urge you all the time, if you have any questions about any programs that you see on there or anything to get additional information on resources, programs, training if available, technical assistance, anything, that website that you see right under the BJA logo, bja.ojp.gov has shown that you need to put on your top 10 list for your website. It'll be very helpful to go in there and really look at all the things that are available to you as a state, local, tribal, or territorial agency.

At this time, I want to take this opportunity to extend a welcome to you from our Director at the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Karhlton F. Moore. And he's been with us at just coming up on a year, was approved and appointed by President Biden. Karhlton comes from the Office of Criminal Justice Services where he was a state administrating agency leader, has been known across the country on his lead in dealing with law enforcement grant funding and really addressing some of the major issues that we see going across the country right now.

Just a real quick—I wanted to do this and kind of share this slide with you that under the Bureau of Justice Assistance, we're really made up of four subgroups. We have a Policy Office, and that's what I'm with, and we're the ones that really prepare programs and get them out in the field, the solicitations that you see on our website. We then have our Programs Office. Our Programs Office, that's really kind of our foundation. They're the ones that deal with all the awards that are given out by the agency here. They deal with all government entities and from all disciplines and they do an excellent job. And we're lucky enough that we work very closely between the Policy Office and Programs Office to provide these services to you in the field. We also have our Operations Office, and our Operations Office are really dealing with a lot of the everyday operations in the dealing with the organization. So we do a lot of this and this is where—and we'll talk a little bit about performance measures out there, that comes under here also. Our final one is the Public Safety Officers' Benefits Program, and that's also known as PSOB, and that is for providing funding support to families and individuals that have been injured in the line of duty dealing—and all public safety officers, not just law enforcement, a very, very important program here also at the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

When you look at what our function is, we have five major strategic focus areas and we're dealing with a lot of things. We're dealing with public safety, we're dealing with corrections and reentry, we're dealing with research-based programs. And really we're looking at how do we improve effectiveness of what's going on there? Helping with program management and really one of the major goals and strategic focus areas we have is how do we identify promising practices, how do we look at what we have funded, carry that onto other places to other agencies, to other programs and learned by the things that we're doing every day.

Now, this is a real summary here, where to get down to. One of the things that BJA, most people say, oh, they're just a funding organization. So we're far more than just a funding organization. We're really something you need to have on your tool belt to make sure to help you do your job, whether it's to look for particular funding, to maybe educate, get education, training, it might be for equipment you need to do your job to help you reduce crime, do all those things you have to. But one of the big things that I think is a major, major area for the BJA and also our other sister agencies at OJP is this ability to partner, partner just with not only other federal agencies, but individuals at the state, local, tribal, and territorial level and to look at professional organizations out there. Extremely, extremely important because these professional organizations kind of set the guidelines on what the national trends are, how do we address certain things? We all know dealing with mass incidents now, increase use of gun violence, all of these things are important. And it's very important for us to partner and work in a collaborative, cooperative effort with the individuals in the field, with professional organizations and federal agencies.

Here, I'm not going to go over this, but you can just take a quick look at what we're going to talk about in today's webinar. And this is a summary of all the slides that we're going to go over here. Now, I will tell you right now, I've had this particular program, the IPEP program, for probably about 15 years. I've seen it change, I've seen increases, I've seen the changes, the positives and the negatives to it. But it's really helped us to get a really good idea on how this program should be structured, what the good elements to it, what we learned over the past, and what we hope to learn in the future.

This particular program, the IPEP program is one of the things where our key point is looking at this idea of intellectual property. And it's basically we're doing it through task forces for areas that either state, local, tribal, territorial, that either have a task force or plan to create one. And this could be within one jurisdiction or could be multiple jurisdictions. And really this particular program falls under DOJ's bigger mission on specifically dealing with intellectual property issues and what kind of cases and investigations and litigation and prosecution that goes along with IP crimes.

Now, as I mentioned before that the IPEP program specifically provides funding, support, and technical assistance to state, local, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions. And our job here is we make the funds available, but it's our job to ensure that these funds assist state, local, tribal, and territorial in building partnerships with agencies in their own regional areas, jurisdictional areas, and also with federal agencies and specifically prosecutors. And one of the things that we've learned over the years as we do these programs that there are some cases that could be better served by a state prosecution or regional prosecution, but there might be other ones that the better approach is through federal prosecution and building that partnership and that relationship is extremely important. And it's not only about the task forces and about the crimes itself, but it's a lot about how do we improve community and buying awareness, how do we take a look at things to make sure that they're not buying knockoff watches, knockoff purses, knockoff clothes? One of the other things that we've had over the years that we've seen are things like batteries and car parts and medical supplies, all those kind of things that have been over the years. We had a case two years ago on the West Coast where an organized gang were selling fake jeans to finance their activities on the West Coast. It was a great case that was submitted and they were one of our grantees.

So one of the things we also have this program that's very unique is this fact that we're looking at the deconfliction element. For those of you that may or may not be aware of what deconfliction actually is, this is an ability for individual agencies that might be working the same areas, and this is more on a location deconfliction, and there is some deconfliction going on between individuals and groups. But this event deconfliction, for example, you might be having a surveillance set up on a particular house in a particular neighborhood. Well, what you may not know is a federal agency might be looking at that same house or they're ready to do a raid on that house or you may have undercovers working in that particular area. This is not only to help us reduce resources and use them in a better, more effective manner. It's also about officer safety. BJA worked in conjunction with organizations and other federal agencies. There are three event deconfliction systems out there. Case Explorer and SAFETNet are both operations from the HIDTAs. And then RISSafe is from the Regional Information Sharing Systems. Before they were standalone in a cooperative effort, we were able to do this now, so individual agencies can put their event in that and it'll cross-reference it and give them an idea and this again, really builds on officer safety, and it also builds on better use of funding and resources.

Now, how much funds are available under this particular program? The IPEP program is actually funded as part of our ECrime, Training and Technical Assistance program. And there's $2.25 million allocated to this particular program. So how we break that down and try to break that up evenly? This does allow applicants to—and they must be eligible applicants, they can request up to $375,000.

Now, that does not preclude you from putting in for only maybe as much as you think you need to do your program or part of your task force. Putting in for the entire amount all the time is not the best thing to do, it's sometimes what do you need for your particular program. Last year, we had a couple of applicants who came in. They came in and asked for less than that. And then, what that allows us to do is there may—and we say we're going to look at probably six awards—sometimes there may be a few more or based on what people have come in and requested. And the one thing that I have to stress, and we'll talk about this, we have a whole section on this is when you make requests to as part of your grant application, you have to make sure that what you're asking for are allowable items. The other point that I'll make right here is that this particular award is for a 24-month period that needs to be reflected in your budget. We've had in the past, as an example, somebody put in and said, "I want to put in to this amount of money, but I'm going to spend it all in 12 months and not in the 24 months." That won't work. They didn't get forwarded because they didn't follow the procedures and guidance that were given in the solicitation. And that's one of the things that I heard more than anything else, is you know specifically the guidance on what's being asked for in the solicitation by BJA.

There's one note that I'll add here, that successful IPEP awardees from 2022 are not eligible to apply for this year's funding under 2023. And the reason for that is, this has been designed as a 24-month program. So those, for example, where people in line that were as successful applicants in 2022, you can apply again in 2024.

Now, let's talk about some of the allowable costs. For any of you that have done any kind of grant submission to the Bureau of Justice Assistance or any of our sister agencies, the normal items that you'll see out there are employment cost for the members of the task force. It could be wages, benefits, overtime, and even funding for the supervisor to overlook the particular program. Now, all of this has to be clearly documented in your budget and it has to be over the two years. But you also have to identify the percent of time associated with that program.

For example, the supervisor might only be 15% of the time, then you would do that calculation in your budget. You may hire an investigator that it is a hundred percent, and then you would put that in there. This also includes prosecutor costs. We've had programs come in in the past where they used the funding to get a prosecutor specifically dedicated to IP prosecutions. And this, again, is this a full-time position, part-time? You have to be able to identify those very specific percentages of work to be done on this program. So we also allow equipment that is specifically used for IP enforcement for part of the task force. So these are things that are used for that. So it might be a laptop or a printer for that laptop, but it wouldn't be for—and it's used specifically for the IP task force. But you wouldn't be able, for example, I'll just use this as an example, you couldn't buy a copy machine for the department and it's going to be used by all sections. We may in the past, we've had similar things happen to that, but we've had to take percentages. So those are things, and we'll talk about this, but asking the appropriate questions.
And the one thing that—we talk about, oh, it's not really equipment, but it's—this also could include training costs for community awareness programs, for information literature, handouts that you want to give to the community. It might be for posters. It might be we've had them used before for billboards, for electronic signs, those kind of things. So those are acceptable costs that you could use this for because it's about making the community aware and reducing the amount of intellectual property crime that is out there. You also can use it for education, training, and conferences.

Now, people say, well, aren’t those all three the same thing? First of all, education would be more of what you would do for the community, and training is more what you do for your officers, and conferences are more general where you're going out there to get more information and interact maybe with other intellectual property investigators or programs. Now, the one thing that will be is they have to be reasonable. For example, if you're hosting a training, it should be made available to all task force agencies and other agencies in that geographic area. We also ask that you look at some minimum numbers, how we have had in the past where we've had to pay for training, and it might only been five officers. We ask that it be a little bit more than that.

There's also free training through the National White Collar Crime Center, NW3C specifically on intellectual property.

Now, all the things that you make request that they have to be reasonable, have to be allocable. In other words, you have to have access to them, and they have to be necessary for that project and its activities. We've had applications come in where they wanted things that would kind of be used for this, but not really. If you're asking for something that's very, very specific to Intellectual Property Enforcement, you need to articulate in the budget, in the narrative section why this particular piece of equipment or this position or whatever is very important to the program. There are places to do that in your budget. You have where you put the actual line item, but you also have a narrative section. So that's very, very important that you are able to articulate that very clearly.

Now, what are some of our non-allowable costs? And this is where we get a lot of questions. Under this particular program, there are no vehicles allowed of any kind. This includes rentals and leases, any unmanned aircraft system, or unmanned aircraft vehicles in any way and anything accessories or to support those two items. This also includes specifically designed for vehicles to include maybe cameras, light bars, things that normally are on a vehicle. Those are not allowable expenses. Are confidential funds. Also, you're not allowed to put in for foreign travel or excessive travel. This was interesting because I guess there's a international intellectual property conference every year and we had an applicant put in one time to send their investigators to this international event. Unfortunately, we can't approve that kind of travel. What I mean by excessive travel? That would be if you're using a large amount of your money to do nothing but go from conference, from conference to conference to conference. But we've had some people talk about an estate program where they've used some travel to go and talk to agencies across the state. So that kind of travel, we don't call that excessive. That's about getting that information out there. What we mean by excessive travel would be, for example, if you have a 10-person task force and you want to send all 10 to a particular conference, that would not be an acceptable or allowable cost.

The other thing is that we don't allow under this are service cost or contract. For example, you can get the cell phone or get the laptop, but the service for that, because it's a reoccurring cost, that's something that needs to be picked up by the agency. That would be maybe for a cell phone or for wireless cards, wireless servers, for laptops or those, kind of, things. The other thing is, too, is if there are some service contracts, for example, maybe a laptop repair, the award is for 24 months. You can't get a five-month service contract on that equipment. It's got to be for that particular timeframe of the award. So the other thing that we can't do is if you've had a previous award with BJA, or maybe you have another award with BJA on something else and you've requested the same type of equipment. The other thing that is not acceptable is the standard equipment that a department or agency should make available to their officers, for example, clothing, weapons, technical equipment, that would be things like technical gear, boots, shields, anything out there that would be tactical in nature, body-worn cameras, bullet-resistant vest, et cetera. The reason that we don't, for example, body-worn cameras, I know this would be beneficial in intellectual property type cases, is that we have a body-worn camera program. We have a bullet-resistant vest program, so we don't duplicate. If we already have a program in place, that's where you would go to get those particular items. The other thing is, for example, if you were hosting, we know that you're allowed to host a training, a conference, a meeting, but you're not permitted to use these funds for any kind of food or refreshments for any of these items. This does not include, for example, if you're traveling the per diem that the officer or employee is using as part of that travel, that is acceptable. Any land acquisitions or construction projects. We've had individuals come in and say, "Well, you know what? We need to redesign an old building that we have to make this the intellectual property task force location." You can't use those funds for that because it's actually construction. The other one would be security enhancements or equipment provided to non-governmental agencies. This would be, for example, if you wanted to put cameras or alarms or something like that, in an area that is not a government facility or a government entity. That would be things that you would have to do through the department itself.

But one thing I would tell you right now, myself and our programs, our representatives, that all responses that come in or any questions that you have has to go to our OJP Response Center, have the number down there, actually, I'll say it several times through the presentation. It's extremely important that you know that's where all your questions go.

Let's talk a little bit about eligibility. And when we talk about eligibility, there are just a few things that are here. So really, it's got to be a government entity. It could be a state government, special district government, and you'll see the list there, also includes Native Americans. But the other thing is, we get questions all the time is, what about if we're jurisdictional, where we have maybe a regional task force and there's going to be multiple agencies in this particular grant that we're asking for? So how do we do that? Can each of them apply? Well, no, each of them will not be allowed to apply. But you could put the application together and then what you would do is name, if you are giving particular funding to that other agency or whatever, you put it in as a proposed subrecipient or subgrantee. And again, you wouldn't be eligible if you are a successful FY 22 IP Award recipient. And as I mentioned, we would not accept multiple applications from agencies within the same jurisdiction. For example, if you are jurisdiction A and you're applying as the law enforcement entity and then in jurisdiction A, you're applying as the prosecutor's office. We would not fund both of those. We'd probably take a look at those and see how they work, how they work together. Our recommendations for you is to check with your law enforcement agency, your prosecutorial people and say, "Hey, let's go in on this together." So what we're trying to do is make this funding available to more areas than as opposed to giving two awards to one geographic area.

So just some definitions, and these are actually covered in the solicitation. This is what law enforcement means. What we really identify as intellectual property and what is really meant by the state. And it's important to know this is according to this definition includes are territories, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and Northern Mariana Islands. And I believe, we had one award last year I believe for one of tour territorial area.

Now, what are we looking for in this particular program? It's very important that for us to maintain and continue to make money available to you in the field, we have to be able to show what's our return on investment in this particular program. So one of the things that we ask from you is how many cases were initiated under this particular program and during the periods? And we'll talk about how you document that in a few bullets down here. But the only thing is, too, we're not only looking at the cases that were successful, or investigations, or prosecutions that were successful but also, ones that showed promise that did not result in arrest. And that really gives us an idea. You may have a lot of good information leading up to that, but just not enough to make a case and to do prosecution. But that information is valuable maybe to another jurisdiction that's working on something very similar. And that's where we talk about this collaboration and communication in sharing that type of information.

Now, how do you do this documentation? Are you required to submit reports to JustGrants? And that's part of the program's aspect of this. But also, this particular program currently has to report this information and their questions in there, and it's guided for you under our PMT or our Performance Management Tool. If you're a successful candidate, we'll explain all that, how to access that, the timeframes that are needed and so forth.

Now, the other thing that's one of the deliverables and it's a key factor here is about having these quarterly meetings. These quarterly meetings need to be—and I know from—I spent a lot of years on the job before coming here in to the department. And we would have crime meetings talking about these are the trends, the things that are going out there, have a lot of people out there talking about these things. This is a place where you can share information. And this is to being the task force members. But it's not only for the task force, the state, local, tribal, and territorial, but also for your fellow partners. So it's important to have all these people come together. Now, the one thing that you have to be very cognizant of here and be prepared and have these submitted with your application is the development of a sustainment plan. In other words, how would this IP Task Force or project, how would it survive when the federal funds are over and they're no longer available? So this has to be prepared. It can't be, well, I'll fill that out if I get the award. No, it's one of the determining factors in whether or not project may or may not be funded.

Now, this is a very, very important part of the presentation in that you need to know and be very aware that there is a two-step application process at BJA currently. Step 1 is you do through Grants.gov. And that's providing some of the very basic documents that you need. And if you go through the application, I'll talk to you about SAMs number and all the information, SF forms that have to be filled out. That deadline is May 23rd at 8:59 PM Eastern Standard Time. The step 2 is the actual application process for JustGrants. And that's a system that's hosted here at the Office of Justice Programs. That deadline is May 30th, 2023. You have to do the first one. You have to get into Grants.gov, and that will give you the invitation to move to JustGrants part. If you missed the deadline for Grants.gov, you will not be able to go into the JustGrants portion of it. Or if you did the Grants.gov and you missed the deadline for JustGrants, you are not going to be able to go in there. There's no process that allows for late applications. But I will say and we'll talk a little bit about the appeal process if something should happen. So you need to be very, very cognizant of these deadlines.

So, let's talk a little bit about what's required in the application. And this is actually the very first portion of the application. And all of these are designed and explained in the solicitation. You have to have a Proposal Abstract which you look for it to only be about one page, the Narrative, and then the Sustainment Plan that I mentioned before. There is a Web-Based Form for dealing with the budget. And I would be very remiss if I didn't say that when you're in that form, you need to read it very carefully. You need to enter your numbers and information correctly, putting things on the right funding lines and in the right categories, because this will work against you in the evaluation process.

Now, the other thing is there are two things that are specifically required under this program, and one is a copy of the memorandum of understanding, a cooperative agreement for the agencies working together on the task force. And this should be current and an updated version. And you have to identify all the—especially if you're paying for their officers as part of that. They need to be part of that MOU. You also have to submit a letter dated and signed by the chief executive or of the applying agency. And what this is is specifically states that that particular where you're applying from have the legislation for this type of enforcement. It's very, very important.

Now, the one thing I would make a point to say here is failure to include these documents or this information in the application can lead or may result in disqualification of your particular application.

Now, some additional documents out there, and these are all mentioned in the solicitation. But they're just quickly talking about lobbying, cost acknowledgment, financial capability, financial management questionnaires, compensation, especially for executives, resumes of key personnel. This is very important, because this coincides with capabilities to do this particular project. So resumes for key personnel and all of these attachments that are on there, these are additional to the narrative. The narrative is limited to 10 pages, and it tells you the guidance on those. These are extra. They don't count against the 10 pages. You also need to have that. You'll have to know your timeline also.

But you also have letters of support. Letters of support are optional. This is different than the letter from the chief executive. Letters of support might be from a congressional person. It might be from a mayor. It might be from the governor. I don't know. But that letter of support, it is very important that these need to be included in the application process. We have had a number of situations where letters come after the application has been submitted and we get letters of support for a particular project. We get those, we keep those, but they aren't put in as part of the review process only because that it violates the deadlines. So other people got their things on time even though it's a letter of support, not a critical item in the application process. It's just about keeping everything equal competition.

Now, the other thing is, too, I mentioned again about the OJP Response Center. If you go to page two, in this solicitation, it's very clear and it tells you all that information that you need there about the Response Center emails and telephone numbers.

Now, I have my application. You've done all the things, and here's the thing that I will tell you right now is all of this up to this point, it's about submitting your application. Words of wisdom, word to the wise, any other way you want me to put it is do not wait till the last minute to submit your application. There's a lot of issues that can occur. It could be a technical issue, problems uploading certain documents. You need to give yourself time to do that. There's plenty enough time to do that. If you have questions, you submit them to the OJP Response Center. I would tell you if you have a question, ask it. Don't assume. But here's after we get the—all the applications are in and it closes, these are the things that our responsibility are. BJA will take the first step. Then we're going to make sure that the applicant is eligible according to the guidelines, and the applicant has submitted all the required documents. Either one of these things could move to disqualification of that particular application. Now, the applications that meet these guidelines are then sent to a peer review process. And a peer review process, three subject matter experts from the field. They get all the documents that you have submitted, that an applicant has submitted, and review those based on what BJA is looking for. So this shows you the importance of answering what is asked for in the solicitation and providing that information.

Then we look at—the peer reviewers, complete their work, they make a recommendation, and they give us a listing of how the application is scored, and we go through that process. We then evaluate the list. Look at each of the programs and the projects and see what we think of them. Then we look at review of the budgets and verify that what's in there are all allowable costs.

This is not something that the peer reviewers do. But they can ask, "Is this a allowable cost?" And we would answer that particular question. We look at those budgets and see what kind of things that are on it. We then move to the approval process through BJA administration. But we would then make notification to the applicant even if they're successful or unsuccessful. And then should you be—award be made, we have to make the final budget clearances. And then the responsibilities come on the awardee to make sure that they have any additional information requested from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Now, let me just go back over these things to keep in mind. We say this right now, and I've said it in 19 years here at the Bureau of Justice Assistance. I can't tell you how many times I've said this, but it's extremely, extremely important that you read the entire solicitation. Know that you are eligible, that you meet those eligibility, and if you have some special nuance or something like that, you say, "I'm not sure based on what's here," reach out to the response center, we'll get an answer for you. The other thing is that we see out there happens a lot, more than I want to ever admit, is when you're putting out your budget numbers in, make sure they're correct and there is commas where there's supposed to be commas, and periods where there's supposed to be periods, and make sure that you have the budget numbers in there for each year. And also, that the totals are correct when you're making the submission. I can't stress enough the importance of that because one of the things we look at is, if you can't pull out your budget correctly, are you going to be able to manage your grant correctly? So this is, kind of, a test to make sure that you're doing this correctly.

Clearly articulate your program in the spaces allowed and the solicitation tells you how much space can you—for this part, there's 10 pages. These are additional things. They have to be double spaced. You have to follow those guidelines. If you don't follow those guidelines, those are all—it tells us, gives us a thing that the applicant may not be able to follow directions, are they going to be a good grantee? All of this is important. I've said this probably half a dozen times since I've been on here, be cognizant of the deadline, the dual deadline dates. Make sure that you follow directions there. Ask questions. Ask questions whenever you can. Never assume because if you—we may not—what you think we want, may not be what we're looking for, so ask the questions. And I ask for this, more than anything else, please double check that all the required documents are attached when you submit your application. When you hit that send button, I mean, you can work on these things, but when you have that send button, make sure they're on there. Once that it's actually closed out, we won't accept documents that say, oh, I forgot to add this. So you got to make sure it's in there when you make the application. Again, it's about following directions.

This one I can't stress enough: don't wait until the last minute to submit. Give yourself time. At least start. At least get in there, do the Grants.gov one first, get that done. You can do that right now. There's not a lot that's required for that. Get that done right away. Then, when you get into JustGrants, you can get started and start putting things together, get an idea of what you need and what you don't need, so forth. This is one of the things that I'm just going to talk or I was telling you about is this idea of technical difficulties, if you're having any kind of difficulty submitting anything, contact the technical assistance people immediately. Don't wait. Contact them immediately. I can't stress that enough.

Now let me just start real quick. I'm going go through some of these kind of things. So you have, these are what's available to you. This is the Grants.gov information. This information is also in the solicitation. So these are the information that you get and this will be available. This is being recorded and will be available online for your reference. This is the JustGrants technical support people. And again, these are the ones that you need. If you're having a problem, you need to reach out to them as soon as you can and don't wait.

This is the Response Center. This gives you the Grants.gov or the grants response—this is our Response Center here. And it has all the contacts, toll free numbers and so forth. And you also could subscribe down here to our JUSTINFO Newsletter just so you get that additional information.

Again, this is a reminder, dual deadlines. The first one is Grants.gov. And basically, there's only really two things that you need to do in there, the SF-424 and the SF-LLL documents. These are in there. Very easy portion of it. Get it done. Get it over with. And the deadline is May 23rd at 8:59 PM. The JustGrants part, the deadline is May 30th, 2023, again, 8:59 PM. And again, I stress it again, read the solicitation carefully. The one note that we have on the bottom here that says, our solicitations used to close at 8:59 PM, it's now — it's stated here 8:59 PM. Make sure you're aware of that.

Now this is the few other resources out here we have for grant applicants. We talked about the resource center and the DOJ Financial Guide. In the solicitation, this link is all through the solicitation. If you have questions, read it. Anybody that if you're applying for a grant, you should have this downloaded and have it on your desktop. This is the kind of your guideline the things that you have there. So it's very, very important. We have some financial online training, that you have to take as a grantee, and we have a resource guide on there, so it's very important that you have all of that information in there.

Now, the one thing is there's ways to stay informed with us. We're on—you can text, please just subscribe Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, they're all out there. And again, I would say put it on your favorites, the BJA website. Something that will be a very, very good tool for you. And this is just again, the importance of the contacts, this is that information, Grants.gov, JustGrants, and the OJP Response Center.

One last time, final thoughts for the presentation is read the entire solicitation, ask questions, don't assume, remember the dual deadlines, apply early, make sure you double check that your guidelines are followed, the attachments are included, and letters of support are included as part of the submission. Remember technical assistance, call right away, do not wait, do not wait. Thank you very much. Again, this is David Lewis from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. We're going to take questions right now. And again, after we get off the line, if you have any questions, you can go to the OJP Response Center. Everything I covered here is in the solicitation. So Daryl, I'll turn it back over to you.

DARYL FOX: Great. Thank you so much, David. And just a reminder to everybody, the PowerPoint recording and transcript for today will be posted to the BJA website, so if you need to go back reference anything mentioned today, you'll be able to do so. And everybody registered will get an email when and where to access those. So keep an eye out for that. Far bottom right on your screen, three dots, in the Q A box, we will be taking questions for the remainder of today's webinar. I'll be glad to take those. So the first one coming in, you did mention conferences, David, and one specific, “Can agents be sent to the 61st Annual Conference on Intellectual Property Law?” And that's actually taking place in November in Plano, Texas.

DAVID P. LEWIS: And they're asking if that's an acceptable conference?

DARYL FOX: Correct.

DAVID P. LEWIS: It would be. But when is it?

DARYL FOX: November 9th, '23.

DAVID P. LEWIS: Yeah. It would be a little bit tight and we hope to get successful grantees, hope to get their money by October 1st, but sometimes that doesn't always happen. But there is a possibility that if you're going to be a successful candidate, we may look at it and you can reach out at some potentially in some kind of a pre-award, kind of, approval. But that's all on a case-by-case basis.

DARYL FOX: And that's the end of the questions in the queue at this time. We can just hang on as other people get those. You can include those. And there is one question, actually, more of a comment about JustGrants, but I didn't see an actual question attached to it. And while we're waiting for additional questions to come in, what I'll do is put up the slide that David referenced. If you do have any questions, once we adjourn today, the OJP Response Center, [email protected] is going to be your one-stop shop for anything programmatic related to the solicitation. Obviously, the technical ones with either Grants.gov or JustGrants, those are listed here as well.

DAVID P. LEWIS: Well, either I did a very good job today or I scared people off.

DARYL FOX: And all the links that David had gone through throughout the presentation are in the chat for you to access. We know that the PowerPoint is not active, and we sent those and put them in there for you to link up to directly, especially for the larger guides, as David mentioned, the Grants Financial Guide, training and the OJP Grant Application Resource Guide, which are wonderful resources as you begin your applications. Okay. “Can funding be allowed to create a grant funded position that specifically addresses solicitation of counterfeit goods?”

DAVID P. LEWIS: Is that—you're talking to the police agency, to a prosecutor's office, where would that be associated with?

DARYL FOX: Police agency.

DAVID P. LEWIS: Yeah, if it's a very specific assignment, yes, it sounds like it's in, kind of, an awareness position, but as long as it's an employee of the agency or the prosecutor's office, or part of the task force, that would be acceptable. If you want to reach out to the Response Center, you can just give them your name and contact information, and we'll have a discussion with you a little bit more with our programs people. And we can go through that. But that's a good question. I think that's something —we're always looking for things that are a little new and unique, and I like that one.

DARYL FOX: There no other questions at this time. We still have a few more moments today.

DAVID P. LEWIS: From the Bureau of Justice Assistance, I want to thank you all for joining today's webinar. I will stay online. We'll stay open online until the 4:30 time, if you want to stick with us or if you have any additional questions. If not, again, thank you again. As you're going through the process or if you're thinking about applying, I do urge you to take heed to my words of wisdom and look at all those items. And again, if you have questions about anything, please reach out to the Response Center, and we'll make sure we get answers for you. Thank you again. Daryl, let's go ahead and end it.

DARYL FOX: Okay. Great. So on behalf of Bureau of Justice Assistance and our panelists, we want to thank you for joining today's webinar. This will end today's presentation.