Akron General Health System (AGHS), a regional hospital system based in Akron, Ohio, will pay $21.25 million to resolve allegations under the False Claims Act of improper relationships with certain referring physicians, resulting in the submission of false claims to the Medicare program. AGHS was acquired at the end…
Sonny Perdue bought a grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural firms in the nation at a small fraction of its estimated value shortly after Donald Trump tapped him to be U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, The Washington Post reported. The investigation found that Archer-Daniels-Midland sold the…
The COI Program is excited to announce that we have recently added a new discloser population to UFOLIO. Any UFIRST users who are “active” or “in-process” key personnel who did not already have access to UFOLIO have now been added to the UFOLIO system and should submit disclosures of outside…
Drug companies are giving groups of MPs and peers that campaign on health issues hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in “hidden” funding that could hand them “undue influence”, research has found. The pharmaceutical industry has built up a “hidden web of policy influence” over dozens of all-party parliamentary…
Audrey Strauss, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (“USAO”), announced that MEYYA MEYYAPPAN, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”) scientist, was sentenced today to 30 days in prison for making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), NASA’s Office of Inspector…
Armed with a Chinese press release translated on the fly via Google, federal agents falsely accused an internationally-renown[ed] welding technology expert at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville of being a spy and brought him to professional ruin. FBI Agent Kujtim Sadiku admitted last week in an ongoing…
The US Senate has voted overwhelmingly in favour of legislation that invests heavily in the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But the bill, once aimed primarily at helping the United States to maintain its status as a global leader through direct funding for research and development, now includes amendments aimed…
WASHINGTON – An Ohio man and rheumatology professor and researcher with strong ties to China was sentenced to 37 months in prison for making false statements to federal authorities as part of an immunology research fraud scheme. As part of his sentence, Zheng was also ordered to pay more…
Nearly four years after noticing spending “irregularities” by a principal investigator (PI), the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) entered into a settlement agreement[1] with the HHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), refunding $1.07 million and paying a penalty of almost $400,000.[2] The four awards at issue—three from NIH and…
A bill introduced in the Senate in April (Strategic Competition Act of 2021, Section 138) seeks to subject US universities’ foreign grants, contracts and gifts to increased oversight by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is an interagency committee that reviews foreign investments in…
