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Dear Amigos,

You may be aware that if you work on a federally funded PHS grant or contract (even as a consultant to someone else who has the grant or contract), your organization has to have an financial conflict of interest (FCOI) policy in place by 8/24 (tomorrow.) Have any of you developed that policy in a form that might serve as a template for others? If you are an individual consultant working alone, this may not apply to you. Warning: my statements about this requirement are not authoritative--it is just my take on it. I just know that if no one else has a nice template, I am going to be spending a bunch of time developing a written policy.

There is certainly a need to be aware of this issue and be ethical, but there is also a fair amount of activity involved in creating and running this policy.  

There is a checklist of components of that policy at this link:

http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/coi/checklist_policy_dev_20120412.pdf

Best wishes,

Nayak



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Nayak Polissar
Principal Statistician
The Mountain-Whisper-Light Statistics
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Dear Nayak,

Virginia Tech rewrote its conflict of interest and commitment policies this year. Here's a link to the 15-page policy document: http://www.policies.vt.edu/13010.pdf

Sections 2.14 and 2.15 of the Faculty Handbook describe the details of the above policy, however, it does not appear that these sections have been updated recently to reflect the restriction of outside consulting for faculty to X% of 1 day per week, where X% is the percent of "hard money" paying the faculty member's salary: http://www.provost.vt.edu/faculty_handbook/chapter02/chapter02.html However, it 

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Eric Vance
LISA (Virginia Tech's Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis)
Director and Assistant Research Professor
Blacksburg VA, United States
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