Yale Investigated Over Grants

Forty-five million dollars in federal grants to Yale University are under investigation by the federal government amid concerns about inadequate accounting practices at the school in New Haven.

According to Yale administrators, the university received subpoenas from the Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) late last week. The subpoenas requested material relating to a total of 47 grants.

Yale, like other major universities including Harvard, relies heavily on federal funding for scientific studies and receives the bulk of its federal grants from the DOD, HHS, and NSF.

The purview of the subpoenas, which Yale officials described as “administrative” rather than criminal, extends to documents as much as ten years old. Such subpoenas need not be part of a grand jury investigation and can be issued either by an executive agency with sufficient statutory power or by the Department of Justice at an agency’s behest.

Yale University President Richard C. Levin issued a statement via e-mail to Yale staff last Friday, pledging to “cooperate fully with these government investigations” and stating his expectation that the faculty would do the same.

“We will spare no effort to remedy any deficiencies in our practices,” Levin said in a statement released by the university on Monday, when the Associated Press first reported on the story.

The investigation is not the first time Yale has come under fiscal scrutiny this year. The HHS inspector general reported in February that the university misreported a significant proportion of its $508,000 in invoices for a particular grant.

Representatives of the DOD, HHS, NSF, and the Yale Office of the Vice President and General Counsel all declined to comment for this story. The Connecticut District of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where any Department of Justice subpoenas against Yale would be filed, did not respond to a request for comment.

—Material from the Associated Press was used in the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.