UNLV settles with US, pays $1.45M over alleged misuse of grant funds

UNLV has paid $1.45 million to resolve a case with the federal government arising from a professor’s alleged improper use of grant money.

The Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents, which self-reported the incident a few years ago, reached the settlement last month on behalf of UNLV with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General “for allegedly violating the Civil Monetary Penalties Law,” according to a notice dated Feb. 3 and posted online this week.

UNLV provided the Review-Journal with a copy of the settlement agreement over a maternal HIV program at the university, which showed a payment due of approximately $1.45 million. Of that, about $1 million was restitution and the rest was a fine.

Executive Vice President/Provost Chris Heavey said Thursday that he believes it’s the first time the university has had to pay back a government grant in its more than 60-year history.

“It’s an unfortunate incident and we have thought deeply about our processes and procedures” in order to make sure “problematic activity” is caught earlier, he said.

A principal investigator with UNLV’s maternal HIV program who is no longer employed by the university “submitted improper claims” between September 2015 and August 2018 to several grants the National Institutes of Health and one from the Health Resources and Services Administration, according to the settlement agreement.

The notice and settlement don’t name the principal investigator. But Dr. Echezona Ezeanolue created the maternal HIV program in 2005 while working at the University of Nevada, Reno, and first received grant funding in 2007 for the program. He ran the program at UNLV from 2015-18.

The Review-Journal was unable to reach Ezeanolue for comment Thursday.

Heavey declined Thursday to confirm whether Ezeanolue was the principal investigator, but a financial conflicts of interest disclosure on the university’s website lists him in that role.

“We are not alleging malfeasance or wrongdoing on the part of the investigator,” Heavey said, but UNLV did acknowledge that the university couldn’t justify that expenditures were in furtherance of the grant-funded research and therefore had to refund the money.

The university wire transferred the full payment Feb. 8 to the federal government. The money came from a UNLV investment income account, Heavey said. “We will not use any tuition or state-allocated funds to pay expenses of this nature.”

The penalty imposed was “actually extremely small,” Heavey said, noting UNLV approached the federal agency directly and was transparent and forthright.

NSHE made a “voluntary disclosure” on behalf of UNLV to the federal government in June 2018, according to the settlement agreement. The federal government alleges claims were “knowingly presented” that the higher education system “knew or should have known were false or fraudulent.”

The principal investigator made payments under the federal awards that were “unallowable” either because there wasn’t enough documentation to show whether activities were related to the funded research or went to entities where a conflict of interest wasn’t disclosed, according to the settlement agreement.

The federal government also alleges there wasn’t sufficient documentation to charge grants for the principal investigator’s salary and fringe benefits, a portion of the salary of a nurse practitioner who worked at the clinic and expenses for at least two trips to Nigeria.

The settlement doesn’t elaborate on the nature of the Nigeria trips. But a 2015 Review-Journal story about Ezeanolue said he had started a research project a couple of years prior using baby showers at churches in his native country as an opportunity to educate pregnant women about HIV testing.

Ezeanolue’s LinkedIn page lists his current job as a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and as vice president of the nonprofit HealthySunrise Foundation in Las Vegas.

As for the incident with the maternal HIV program, “this is a really rare occurrence,” Lori Olafson, interim vice president of research at UNLV, said Thursday.

There are hundreds of researchers doing excellent work at the university, she said. “There are bad actors in every industry and fortunately, our checks and balances were able to catch this one.”

At any given moment, UNLV has tens of millions of dollars in research funding that comes from outside sources, Heavey said. “This is just a sliver of a moment of the amount of research money that flows through the university in any given year.”

UNLV made changes for investigators who are working under grant funding following the incident, switching from a manual to electronic process.

“It’s all a number of electronic steps and you can’t skip any of them,” Olafson said.

Timeline of events

Heavey said Thursday the principal investigator was a highly-regarded professor with a stellar reputation and record of existing grant funding when he was hired.

UNLV hired the professor in 2015 and began to realize in 2017 there wasn’t sufficient documentation related to the expenditures under the grants for the maternal HIV program, Heavey said.

Individuals apply for grant funding, he said, but the university receives the award and certifies if expenditures are documented.

UNLV suspended the maternal HIV program in September 2017 without notice to the employees or 62 patients.

In October 2017, UNLV placed Ezeanolue and nurse practitioner Dina Patel — who was running the program with him — on administrative leave, and they were escorted off campus.

A family of a 4-year-old girl who has HIV filed a lawsuit seeking to force the university to reopen the program, but the suspension was lifted on the day of a hearing.

UNLV launched an administrative audit and paid Huron Consulting Group up to $20,000 to conduct it. The findings, however, were kept secret.

A Chapter 6 hearing, where disciplinary action against the employees would have been considered, was scheduled in April 2018 but was canceled because Ezeanolue and Patel were no longer employed by the university. UNLV officials wouldn’t say whether the two resigned.

Dr. David Di John was announced in November 2017 as the maternal HIV program’s new principal investigator.

Contact Julie Wootton-Greener at jgreener@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2921. Follow @julieswootton on Twitter.