Misusing public trough

Hale Champion, financial vice president, said this week that the University was seriously compromised when auditors from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that federal grant money to the department of Nutrition at the School of Public Health had been misused and Harvard had to return $132,000 to the government.

In a May 18 report on its investigation, the NIH auditing agency said that the School's department of Nutrition had billed NIH for work unrelated to the grants it was billed to. NIH got its check from Harvard in September.

The report found, based on charges by the researcher who directed the grant projects, that the department violated federal regulation by charging for some of its own operating expenses in order to recover money it had advanced to the researcher before he received grant support.

Fredrick J. Stare, who was chairman of the department until June 30, said this week that he is "technically responsible" for deciding which salaries in the department were charged to which accounts. But, in reality, an assistant assigned the costs, filling out and signing certifications of the amount of time employees spent on each research project.

Federal regulations say that the director of each research project must sign such certifications.

Phin Cohen, the former assistant professor of Nutrition who directed the projects in question, told NIH investigators that he had not been allowed to see the department's accounting on his projects. When the investigators checked, they found that much of the department's office work had been charged to his grants, which were intended to pay for lab research on blood platelets.

From correspondence between the department and Cohen, the NIH agency concluded that the department appointed Cohen in September 1969 on the understanding that Cohen's work would be supported by a grant from the Army.

When the contract failed to materialize and the department had to support Cohen's work for a year and a half until he got some grant money, the department told Cohen he was expected to repay the department for its support, Cohen told NIH investigators.

But someone in the department went ahead and got the department's money back from Cohen's grants.

Stare retired this summer, and Cohen's two-year appointment ran out in June, so the School has taken no action with either of them.

In the end, all the case prompted was a quick rebate to the government, and a memo from Hale Champion to all deans and department heads asking them to be careful in the way their departments use grant money.