Duke University: Fabricated Research in NIH and EPA Grant Claims

Duke University agreed to pay $112.5 million to resolve allegations of fabricated research in NIH and EPA grant claims. The government alleged that false mouse-research results and statements based on them reached applications and progress reports, causing the agencies to fund claims they otherwise would not have paid. If you know the experiment behind a result, you may recognize the discrepancy before anyone reading the grant submission can see it.

Duke is a private university in Durham, North Carolina. The Justice Department’s March 25, 2019 announcement identified grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.

How Fabricated Research Reached Federal Grant Claims

The government alleged that Duke knowingly submitted or caused the submission of claims containing falsified or fabricated data or statements in thirty grants between 2006 and 2018. The disputed work concerned research on mice by a technician in Duke’s Airway Physiology Laboratory.

The allegation reached both the experimental results and the statements built from those results. A result can be misrepresented in the research itself, and a later description can carry that misrepresentation into a document asking the government to fund it. The government’s account connected those stages to payments by the funding agencies.

Duke’s settlement covered alleged false information in both applications and progress reports, so the comparison extends from what the university proposed to what it later reported. For an insider, the relevant account of an experiment may be the one inside a report submitted well after the work in the lab.

This is a civilian grant-fraud case. Here, the important connection was between the research representations and the federal grants supporting the work.

The Justice Department described the research funds available to the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency as limited. We see the unfairness plainly: money awarded on fabricated results rewards the false account of an experiment while honest researchers have to produce the evidence. Hardly a fair contest. The people doing the work and the taxpayers funding it both have a stake in whether the grant submission tells the truth.

Why This Was a Whistleblower Case

A former employee brought Duke’s alleged grant misconduct into a False Claims Act qui tam case. The Justice Department said the whistleblower pursued the case on the government’s behalf, rather than the government taking it over.

The university was the settling party. The alleged false results came from a technician’s work, but the claims were Duke’s submissions to federal funders. For a grant insider, that is the connection we examine: how a result moved from the laboratory into a representation made in the institution’s name.

How Much Money Can a Whistleblower Get From a Qui Tam Lawsuit?

The Justice Department said Duke’s former employee would receive $33.75 million from the settlement. That was the announced whistleblower reward.

A whistleblower case under the False Claims Act can pay 15% to 30% of what the government recovers. In a research-grant case, we work with you to connect the scientific discrepancy to the institution’s submissions and the funding behind them.

What Duke Shows About Research Grant Fraud

Duke’s case centers on alleged false research results in grant claims.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute offers a parallel to Duke’s alleged use of false research results: it admitted that publications reused images to represent different experimental conditions, and its grant applications referenced misrepresented article data.

What did the submission say about the research, what work supported that statement, and how did the statement reach a funding decision?

What Proof Do You Need as a Whistleblower?

For a research-data case like Duke’s, useful evidence connects the underlying experiment, the result or statement presented to the agency, the application or progress report carrying it, and the federal funding. We examine those connections with you, including who knew what the research showed and who took responsibility for the submission.

Different people may recognize different parts of the same discrepancy. A laboratory employee may know the work that produced a result. A collaborator may recognize a statement that does not match that work. A research administrator may know where the statement entered the grant paperwork. We bring the scientific account and the funding account together.

Approval procedures deserve scrutiny too. The 2019 Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting study Unique Characteristics of Management Override Fraud Cases compared fraud involving management overriding controls with fraud involving missing controls. It found override fraud in organizations with internal audits, independent financial audits, anti-fraud policies and codes of conduct. Its conclusion is pointed:

For our review of a grant concern, that means looking at the decisions behind a submitted report as well as the approval attached to it. A policy tells us what should happen. Your account of the experiment, the submission and the people handling it can tell us what did.

You Know the Research Behind the Report

If you worked in the lab or handled the grants and know where the reported results departed from the work, speak with our whistleblower experts about that discrepancy. We build your strongest research-grant whistleblower case with you and bring in research fraud whistleblower lawyers who can connect the science to the federal claims. You have a partner from the first conversation through the whole journey.