Can my grant pay for business lunches and/or dinners?

Recently there were questions brought up about paying for lunches/dinners during meetings that were related to grants on grant accounts. In order to get the institutional response, I asked Brenda our Grants Manager at OSP and below is her response.

Ultimately remember that when the grant is in the process of being closed out, OSP will run a Draft Report of Expenditures and will identify unallowable items in a global way (by subcode usually). These are items that are considered unallowable by the A-21 (Office for Management and Budget Circular that governs grant expenses from federally sponsored grants) specifically. Unless we provide appropriate and adequate justification (preferably a copy of the budget justification documenting that the expense was budgeted), we run the risk of having to cost transfer off those unallowable expenses after the grant budget period has ended. At that time, the Principal Investigator or their department will be responsible for providing an account number (indirect return/dept. account) to cost transfer those expenses off of your grant and onto the indirect return or dept. account. It will then be too late to "spend" those funds that were just freed up.

So rather than waiting until it is too late, my staff has been advised to advise you of the potential unallowable nature of expenses. It is often a gray area, so we are just trying to help you to spend your funds in the most allowable fashion to avoid problems at the end.