National Institutes of Health: Conflicts of Interest in Extramural Research (PDF; 832 KB)
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General
From e-mail:

NIH provided us with 438 financial conflict-of-interest reports for fiscal years 2004 through 2006. However, this number does not represent the total number of conflicts of interest reported by grantee institutions because NIH’s Institutes and the Office of Extramural Research (OER) were unable to provide us with all of the actual conflict-of-interest reports they received from grantee institutions. Although Federal regulations require grantee institutions to report financial conflicts of interest, the regulations do not require them to report the nature of the conflicts or other details. At least 89 percent of financial conflict-of-interest reports we reviewed did not state the nature of the conflicts or how they would be managed. Based on our review of the documentation, we found very few cases in which Institutes followed up with grantee institutions regarding the nature of a financial conflict of interest and/or the management plan for a conflict. We also found that many Institutes rely on the good faith of the grantee institution to ensure compliance with Federal financial conflict-of-interest regulations, rather than directly overseeing or reviewing grantee institutions’ management of financial conflicts of interest.

We recommend that NIH (1) increase oversight of grantee institutions to ensure their compliance with Federal financial conflicts-of-interest regulations; (2) require grantee institutions to provide details regarding the nature of financial conflicts of interest and how they are managed, reduced, or eliminated; and (3) require Institutes to forward to OER all financial conflict-of-interest reports that they receive from grantee institutions and ensure that OER’s conflict-of-interest database contains information on all conflict-of-interest reports provided by grantee institutions. NIH concurred with two of our recommendations but did not concur with our recommendation to require grantee institutions to provide details about financial conflicts of interest.

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