Why OIG Did This Review

• Each year, NIH invests billions of dollars to fund biomedical research at thousands of institutions.
• As the awardees of NIH funding, institutions must ensure that their investigators disclose all resources made available to them in support of and/or related to all of their research (i.e., other support). However, there have been instances in which some investigators failed to disclose substantial contributions of resources from other entities, including foreign governments.

What OIG Found

Just 19 percent of institutions correctly identified all scenarios in our survey that described monetary donations they must report to NIH. Furthermore, a quarter of institutions did not correctly identify any of the reporting scenarios in our survey.

Three-quarters of institutions reported that a better understanding of NIH’s distinction between monetary donations that must be reported and gifts that do not need to be reported would help them comply with reporting requirements. Examples that demonstrated specific gaps in institutions’ understanding of NIH’s reporting requirements included incorrectly noting that only monetary donations of certain dollar amounts must be reported to NIH (there is no such threshold) and incorrectly requesting additional details that were not needed to determine whether scenarios reflected donations that should be reported.

What OIG Recommends

NIH should:

1. Clarify for NIH-funded institutions which monetary donations they must report to NIH as other support.

NIH concurred with our recommendation.