COI Policies: Tax Dollars Should Not Be Used to Fund U.S. Institutions Not Making the Grade

Abstract

Over two billion dollars was awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in research funding from 2010 to March 2012 to institutions receiving a grade of “C,” “D,” or “F” on their conflict of interest policies, as determined by the American Medical Student Association's scorecard on conflict of interest policies. More institutional oversight is needed with regard to assuring conflict of interest policies at U.S. research institutions are adequate. As stewards of public funds, HHS should require a minimum standard which institutional conflict of interest policies should meet, beyond current regulatory requirements, before granting funding.

Keywords:

• conflict of interest
• NIH
• grants

Notes

1. Grades reported as of June 2011 (http://www.amsascorecard.org) for 2010 and March 2012 for 2011–12. HHS data was taken from the HHS Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools; http://report.nih.gov/award/trends/FindOrg.cfm), frozen as of October 1, 2010 for fiscal 2010 and November 15, 2011 for fiscal 2011. The total amount to these institutions increased in 2010 to $1,340,912,935 after AMSA December 2010 revisions were included. In an abundance of caution, we were purposely conservative in reporting the dollar amounts and underreport the total amount of HHS dollars flowing to these institutions because these amounts do not include projects funded by the Recovery Act. Also, we purposely didn't include dollars provided to independent research units at schools or dollars provided to affiliated schools as reported in 2010 with the older version of the website, since we could not be sure that a medical school's coi policy applied to other schools within an institution. Nor, did we include fellowship or training grant dollars.