Word: auditional
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...course, that the SPH has faced charges of misappropriation of funds. Way back in 1975, when one-time SPH faculty member Dr. Phin Cohen charged Harvard officials with actively misusing federal research funds--and then told the NIH about it--the battle began. Then in May 1976, an NIH audit concluded that the school's department of Nutrition had overcharged the federal government by $132,000 and the agency told Harvard to give it back. The University concurred with the findings and returned the money in September 1976--in an effort to put an end to the entire episode...
...against the University and two SPH officials, demanding his reinstatement as an assistant professor of Nutrition and pointing the finger at Harvard's unbalanced books. When a Congressional subcommittee heard what Cohen had to say, Harvard was brought face to face with HEW. And HEW launched a massive investigatory audit of some $225 million in federal research grants given to various University faculties from 1974-77. So much for the buddy system...
...headquarters of NIH, Cohen got a more sympathetic response. After an NIH audit, the agency hit Harvard for a refund of $132,000. "Most of Cohen's allegations had substance," says NIH Division Manager James Shriver. "When we completed our investigation of his activities, Harvard made restitution almost immediately." But NIH was sufficiently aroused to ask for a broader investigation by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. HEW's preliminary findings, released earlier this year, hit Cambridge like a ton of red tape: HEW auditors questioned the way Harvard accounted for 40% of $37 million in federal...
...years since he left Harvard, Phin Cohen has been working part time in student health services and industrial medicine. Outside of work he has trans formed himself into an avenging angel of bookkeeping; invoking the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to HEW audit files, he has made a nationwide study of the accounting practices of 100 colleges. Among his findings: overbilling of federal research grants for medical insurance; hiding cost overruns with "journal transfers"-the practice of billing one project for work done on another...
Government research grants now total $4.5 billion a year, in the case of some universities, up to 40% of the total operating budget. The audit crackdown is likely to put a serious crimp in the already strained relationship between academia and the federal bureaucracy...