Duke University will pay the US government $122.5 million to settle fraud charges after it was established that Duke researchers submitted false data to the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. The false data were used to justify 30 research grants given to Duke from 2006 to 2018.
Kate Sullivan filed this report on Duke University’s fraud settlement for CNN:
“This settlement sends a strong message that fraud and dishonesty will not be tolerated in the research funding process,” EPA Acting Region 4 Administrator Mary S. Walker said in a statement.
A former Duke employee, Joseph Thomas, originally brought the allegations in a lawsuit under the whistleblower provision of the False Claims Act, according to the Justice Department, and will receive $33,750,000 from the settlement. The university receives millions of dollars every year in funding for grants from the EPA and NIH, according to the Justice Department.
“The results of certain research related to mice conducted by a Duke research technician in its Airway Physiology Laboratory, as well as statements based on those research results, were falsified and/or fabricated,” according to the department.
“We expect Duke researchers to adhere always to the highest standards of integrity, and virtually all of them do that with great dedication,” Duke President Vincent E. Price was quoted as saying in a news release by the university. “When individuals fail to uphold those standards, and those who are aware of possible wrongdoing fail to report it, as happened in this case, we must accept responsibility, acknowledge that our processes for identifying and preventing misconduct did not work, and take steps to improve.”
According to the release, “Duke discovered the possible research misconduct in 2013 after the technician was fired for embezzling money from the university, which also occurred over the same period.”
