The proportion of grant dollars that the National Institutes of Health awarded to universities to reimburse their indirect costs of research held steady at 28.5 percent annually from 2003 through 2005, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. In the report, which was completed in January but released today, the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found that the rates were stable “because there was little change in the largest component of the indirect-cost rate — the administrative component,” a matter with considerable resonance for academic research. The GAO report also provided an overview of the NIH’s audits of universities, both those conducted by nonfederal auditors and those conducted by the NIH’s inspector general.