http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501472.html

NIH Lax on Moonlighting by Scientists, Report Finds

By David Willman
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, August 6, 2005; Page

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 percent of the recent outside arrangements reviewed by the
inspector general of the 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 was made public yesterday.

"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 to be entered into by
NIH scientists "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."

The review marks another condemnation of NIH's recent policies
governing moonlighting by agency scientists. In July 2004, the chief of
the Office of Government Ethics concluded that NIH was beset with a
"permissive culture" toward conflicts of interest.

NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni announced broad restrictions in
February, citing payments by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies
of millions of dollars in consulting fees and stock to NIH scientists.

Zerhouni agreed to prohibit NIH employees from accepting any further
payments from such companies.

A group of NIH scientists is resisting the tougher ethics rules, which
include a provision that would force employees to divest their stock in
biomedical companies. The scientists have called for Zerhouni to relax
the ban on consulting for drug companies and to rescind the
stock-divestiture provision, which has yet to be implemented.

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TC