WASHINGTON — Ethics officials at the National Institutes of Health often approved senior scientists' requests to moonlight for drug companies and other outside organizations without gathering adequate documentation to help judge whether the arrangements posed conflicts of interest, federal inspectors have found.
In 81% of the recent outside arrangements reviewed by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ethics officials were found to have approved the deals on the basis of limited information. This and other findings are included in a report by the inspector general that is to be made public today.
"In no instance was the documentation we reviewed adequate for us to make a definitive determination regarding whether an activity was appropriate," the report said. "Inadequate documentation for outside activities can, intentionally or unintentionally, hide potential violations."
The report found that information submitted by the scientists to NIH ethics officials "included insufficient detail regarding the nature of the outside activities, the nature of employees' official job duties, the differences between the outside activities and their official job duties, the outside organizations, and any NIH funding or partnerships with the outside organizations."
The advance descriptions of the outside positions that NIH scientists proposed to take "were too general to demonstrate that employees' official duties would not overlap," the report said.
The inspector general's reviewers "could not determine the appropriateness of eight activities, and they also determined that two of the activities appeared to violate regulations."
The report also said, "It is quite possible that, due to the approach taken in this review, we have underestimated the number of activities that should not have been approved."
A copy of the 72-page report was obtained Thursday by the Los Angeles Times.
The review marks another condemnation of the NIH's recent policies governing moonlighting by agency scientists. In July 2004, the chief of the Office of Government Ethics concluded that the NIH had a "permissive culture" toward conflicts of interest. The lax policies were largely the result of an agencywide lifting of controls in late 1995 by the director of the NIH at the time, Dr. Harold E. Varmus.
