A report from the National Institutes of Health has detailed a suite of management and ethics problems at the agency's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The report, which was sent to Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) yesterday (Apr 15), unearthed apparent grant funding irregularities at NIEHS. The agency awarded grants to 45 applications that had scored beyond the payline between FY 2005 and FY 2007, without documenting the justifications for making these exceptions, according to the report. Funding federal grant applications that are ranked above the payline is rare but is not, in itself, a violation of the rules. But properly documented justification is required in these cases.

The report also stated that the ethics program at NIEHS lacked sufficient personnel, documentation of ethics actions, and attention to conflicts of interest within the agency.

According to the report, most of the financial disclosure reports filed by NIEHS employees between 2004 and 2007 were either "not reviewed by NIEHS ethics staff or were reviewed and certified, but with obvious errors." The NIH's Ethics office reviewed a sample of 48 confidential financial disclosure reports filed by NIEHS employees in 2004 and 2005, and found that the NIEHS's ethics staff had reviewed only 24 of the reports.

As part of the report, an NIH consultant carried out a survey of attitudes last fall and found that a negative perception of NIEHS leadership persists among agency staffers. The report found that perceptions of "poor communications, retribution, a hostile leadership style, favoritism, and nepotism," were widespread among NIEHS employees.

Last year Grassley began inquiring about management problems at NIEHS that largely focused on the agency's former director, David Schwartz, who resigned earlier this year. After receiving the report yesterday, Grassley asked NIH director, Elias Zerhouni, to officially respond to NIEHS's decision to fund 45 grants out of rank order without justifying those awards.