Dive Brief:
- Northeastern University will pay the largest civil settlement the National Science Foundation has ever received following almost a decade of alleged mishandling of federal research dollars.
- The $2.7 million settlement also comes with a five-year compliance agreement that will require Northeastern to prove that proper oversight and safeguards are in place to handle future research funding.
- In this case, the NSF alleges that Northeastern disbursed advances and other payments to former physics professor Stephen Reucroft without “proper justification or requisite verification” for work relating to high energy particle research at CERN.
Dive Insight:
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a written statement from Northeastern places much of the blame on Reucroft, saying the university self-reported the discrepancies once they were discovered. The statement from the NSF about the settlement, however, says Northeastern “failed, for more than two years, to notify NSF when it discovered significant problems.”
Research universities allocate millions of dollars every year in costs associated with maintaining grants. The reporting requirements are sometimes incredibly arduous. The Northeastern settlement, however, shows just how major the consequences are for lax oversight.