Rules differ by funder and by institution — confirm the specifics with your research office and your partner's finance office before fixing a budget.
When your Vietnamese partner returns a budget with no overhead line, the usual reading is that their costs are simply lower. That reading is often wrong, and acting on it moves real costs onto them.
Why the overhead line is missing
Your institution has a negotiated indirect rate applied to everything. Many Vietnamese institutions have no published rate for international grants, or have one that does not resemble yours.
Faced with a budget template asking for an overhead percentage, a partner who does not have an approved figure will often leave it blank rather than name a number they cannot defend. Blank then travels through your submission as though the cost did not exist.
It does exist. It lands on the department, or on the lead researcher personally — and you will not hear about it, because raising it after signature feels to them like asking for more money.
What actually goes unfunded
Coordination time. Your partner's lead spends real hours on scheduling, reporting, internal approvals and translation. Unless someone budgeted that time, it is unpaid work on top of a full teaching load.
Finance and administrative handling on their side — the staff time to process each transfer, each procurement, each report.
Bank charges and exchange differences. Over a multi-year award with several transfers this is not trivial, and the default assumption on each side is that the other absorbs it.
Taxes and mandatory deductions applying to funds received. The amount available for work can be materially lower than the figure in your budget, and nobody discovers this until the first transfer arrives.
The cost of an extension. No-cost extensions are common. The months added still consume your partner's administrative capacity, with no funding attached.
How to raise it without turning it into a rate argument
Ask the question in a form your partner can answer.
Instead of "what is your indirect rate", ask: which costs will your institution incur because of this project that are not in the activity lines? Then ask where those belong in the budget.
That phrasing lets a partner without an approved rate give you a list of real items — which is what you need to build a defensible budget anyway.
Ask it at the first budget conversation. Once the proposal is submitted, the only route is a variation request, and those are slow and sometimes refused.
When your funder forbids indirect costs on a subaward
Several routes remain, and they are ordinary practice rather than workarounds:
Budget the coordination explicitly as a direct cost — a named fraction of the partner lead's time for project management, with the management tasks described. This is usually the cleanest fix.
Budget administrative support directly where the funder allows it: a part-time project administrator on the partner side, rather than an untracked percentage.
Carry some services on your own budget instead of transferring funds — paying conference registrations, publication charges, software licences or equipment centrally.
Check who bears bank and currency costs and name it in the agreement rather than leaving it to whoever is holding the invoice.
Cash flow is often the harder constraint
Reimbursement-based transfers assume the receiving institution can front the money. Many partner departments cannot, and this blocks work more often than any rate disagreement does.
Three terms worth settling before signature: the size and timing of the first advance; how long your institution takes to process a report and release the next tranche; and whether front-loaded activities — fieldwork, participant payments, equipment — can be advanced rather than reimbursed.
If the answer to the third is no, say so early enough that the work plan can be arranged around it. A partner who discovers in month four that they must fund three months of fieldwork from their own department will either delay or quietly reduce the scope.
One thing to check on your own side
Ask your research office whether your indirect rate is charged on the full award including the subaward amount. In some arrangements it is, which means the partner's share carries your overhead as well as their unfunded costs.
Knowing that before you present a figure avoids a conversation that is hard to recover from — the one where a partner works out the arithmetic themselves.
Why does my Vietnamese partner quote no overhead?
Many institutions have no published indirect rate for international grants, so a partner will leave the field blank rather than name a figure they cannot defend.
What question should I ask instead of asking for a rate?
Ask which costs their institution will incur because of the project that are not in the activity lines, and where those belong in the budget.
What if the funder forbids indirect costs on a subaward?
Budget coordination time and administrative support as named direct costs, or carry some services centrally on your own budget instead of transferring funds.
Which cash-flow terms matter most?
The size and timing of the first advance, how long report processing takes, and whether front-loaded activities can be advanced rather than reimbursed.
