Why NIH tightening financial rules will do absolutely nothing about real COI [DrugMonkey]

NIH has been touting their new and improved reporting rules which are intended to keep their grantee PIs on the straight and narrow. A news bit in Nature has the highlights.
The proposed rules state that a "significant financial interest" exists when the combined value of an investigator's equity holdings in, and payments from, a publicly traded company exceed US$5,000 in any given year. Under current rules, the reporting threshold is $10,000.

Got it. Somewhere between $5,000 and $9,999 per year in consulting or stock cashout or dividends or whatnot we have a big group of PIs out there doing bad things for the money. And we're going to fix that.

Please. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...