BIOETHICS

The Bioethics Imperative XXI
Flow of allegations through the OIG: A conversation with James Kroll,
Administrative Head of the NSF Office of Inspector General

“Mokita”: The truth we all know and agree not to talk about. Papua New Guinea

Like my original motivation for becoming interested in bioethics (http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/mandoli.cfm), my motivation for exploring the consequences of ethical breaches was direct: I ran into a potential ethical breach in a proposal I was reviewing and was at a loss as to what to do. Who was I supposed to tell, and what was I supposed to tell them? No one ever taught me what to do in this instance, and I bet others are in the same state of ignorance that I was. I was surprised how quickly and directly my allegation reached the Office of Inspector General (OIG), an organization that I was vaguely aware of from grade school classes! You can read about what to do in a previous column (http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/janfeb05/10mandoli20.cfm) or look on the OIG website (http://www.oig.dol.gov/).

In preparing to write this column, I realized that understanding the structure of the OIG was essential to my understanding of the flow of allegations through the system. Just as I could not properly fulfill my duty as a peer-reviewer if I did not know how to recognize and then report potential ethical breaches, without an understanding of how allegations are processed I could not know the consequences of making an ethical mistake and I certainly could not know how to defend myself if I were accused. That’s why my last column dealt with the structure of the OIG.

An analogy may be useful here: How do faculty members at a university know how to function properly if they do not know and understand the managerial system in which they work? In other words, managerial structure and process need to be transparent for anyone to work dynamically and efficiently within any governing structure. Buy-in and implementation of change of that structure by the governed will flow as an added benefit of transparency.

Now that we have reviewed the structure of the OIG (http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/janfeb05/10mandoli20.cfm), we can look at the magnitude and nature of OIG activities. In 2003, NSF received some 40,000 proposals (Fig. 1). Allegations of ethical breaches were raised in less than 1 percent of those proposals. Ethical breaches are triaged into one of three paths: Those involving violation of law are usually investigated by the Civil/Criminal section (see the example of a recent fraud case that follows this article); those involving violation of rule or regulation are usually investigated by the Administrative section; and those lacking substantive evidence of a violation of rule, regulation, or law are given a “Preliminary” review to determine substance. Eventually, those designated Preliminary will go into either the Civil/Criminal or the Administrative section or simply be closed with no further action. The outcomes from 2003 are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Figure 1. The flow of allegations through the NSF Office of Inspector General. The numbers provided represent the volume through each path using 2003 as an example.

The OIG handles numerous types of allegations. In the past, the Administrative section has looked at allegations involving

• conflict of interest
• plagiarism
• intellectual theft
• fabrication of data
• falsification of data
• false statements in the substance of a proposal
• false statements in a CV or current/ pending support
• data sharing
• fraud
• impeding research progress
• mentoring/abuse of colleagues
• animal welfare/permit violations
• recombinant DNA
• peer review violation
• human subjects violations
• biohazards.

In the past, the Civil/Criminal section has looked at allegations of

• fraudulent or false statements
• fraud/embezzlement
• fraudulent/false claims
• computer fraud
  
• conflict of interest.

Interestingly, conflict of interest can fall into either the Administrative or Civil/Criminal section: The less serious cases tend to involve a violation of rule or regulation and so fall to the Administrative section, whereas violations of law go to Civil/Criminal investigation.

Plagiarism comes in two forms: taking text or stealing ideas. Copying text from others is easy to prove or disprove because the evidence is right there in print. Stealing ideas—“intellectual theft”—is the largest category of allegations that OIG is asked to consider and is much harder to prove than copying text. How does one demonstrate that an idea is unique to oneself and that no one else has ever thought of it? This portion of my conversation with James Kroll at OIG left me wondering what one does with ideas that arise in conversations among people. Such “brainstorming” often engenders ideas that one might never have in isolation, but I can imagine that noses can get bent out of shape in these instances, too.

Intellectual theft is a category in and of itself, in part because it is the most prevalent allegation brought to the attention of the OIG. “Most often, plagiarism occurs in the Background section of a proposal. Case #6 [http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/novdec04/13mandoli19.cfm], however, was unique in that the person had stolen words that also conveyed a unique scientific concept. This individual used the idea in the scientific portion of his own proposal. Therefore, he was stealing the idea that he had read in someone else’s proposal for which he had been asked to provide a confidential review.” (James Kroll, Nov. 22, 2004, to Dina Mandoli.) Despite the frequency of allegations of intellectual theft, in the history of the OIG there have been only two “findings” (i.e., proven cases) of this kind of research misconduct. The rest were closed for lack of substantive evidence.

Next time: OIG investigations and their outcomes.

Dina Mandoli
mandoli@u.washington.edu

Ex-College President Charged with Fraud
December 9, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA (AP)—The former president of Morris Brown College was charged along with an aide Thursday with swindling federal loan programs out of about $5 million by signing up hundreds of students for loans they didn’t want and using the money to pay the school’s bills.

Delores Cross, 68, and Parvesh Singh, the 62-year-old former financial aid director at the historically black college, were charged with more than 30 counts of fraud each.

Calls to their attorneys were not immediately returned.

Federal prosecutors said Cross, president from 1999 to 2002, increased school spending by more than $8 million her first year, then sought about 1,800 fraudulent loans to pay for it.

Some of the students no longer attended the college and some never realized there were loans in their names until they applied for credit elsewhere and discovered they had defaulted on them.

“That’s the real tragedy of this situation,” said U.S. Attorney David Nahmias.

When the financial troubles were uncovered, Cross and Singh were fired and the college lost its accreditation. Enrollment plunged from about 2,000 students to as few as 80 at one point.

Nahmias said Cross and Singh apparently hid the scheme from the board of trustees