The National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance Did Not Effectively Monitor Awards and Subawards (WIV)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL

 Report in Brief
Date: January 2023
Report No. A-05-21-00025

The National Institutes of Health and EcoHealth Alliance Did Not Effectively Monitor Awards and Subawards, Resulting in Missed Opportunities to Oversee Research and Other Deficiencies: Despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, we found that NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements.

Why OIG Did This Audit

OIG initiated this audit because of concerns regarding the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) grant awards to EcoHealth Alliance (EcoHealth), NIH's monitoring of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth's use of grant funds, including its monitoring of subawards to a foreign entity.

Our objectives were to determine whether: (1) NIH monitored grants to EcoHealth in accordance with Federal requirements and (2) EcoHealth used and managed its NIH grant funds in accordance with Federal requirements.

How OIG Did This Audit

We obtained a list of all NIH awards to EcoHealth and all subawards made by EcoHealth during Federal fiscal years 2014 through 2021 (audit period). Our audit covered three NIH awards to EcoHealth totaling approximately $8.0 million, which included $1.8 million of EcoHealth's subawards to eight subrecipients, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

 Although WIV cooperated with EcoHealth's monitoring for several years, WIV's lack of cooperation following the COVID 19 outbreak limited EcoHealth's ability to monitor its subrecipient. NIH should assess how it can best mitigate these issues and ensure that it can oversee the use of NIH funds by foreign recipients and subrecipients.

 EcoHealth identified two substantive areas of disagreement with the reported findings: (1) the timeliness of EcoHealth’s Year 5 progress report and (2) whether an experiment exhibited enhanced virus growth. Regarding the nine monetary recommendations, EcoHealth stated that it reimbursed NIH for the total reported unallowable costs and provided NIH with details on the amounts of allowable but unreimbursed costs. However, EcoHealth disagreed with OIG’s interpretation of Federal requirements for some items of cost.

With respect to EcoHealth’s comments regarding the timeliness of EcoHealth’s Year 5 progress report, we have no evidence that the progress report, which was initiated on NIH’s online portal in July 2019, was fully uploaded to the online portal at that time. Regarding the finding that an experiment exhibited “enhanced growth,” our audit did not assess scientific results for any of the experiments or make any determination regarding the accuracy of NIH’s or EcoHealth’s interpretations of the Years 4 and 5 research results. Our audit found that NIH’s own evaluation of the Year 5 progress report concluded that the research was of a type that should have been reported immediately to NIH.