Sure, Beware the B-School Boys; but as UD has often noted on this blog, your engineering school features a scam so smooth, so consistent, so reliable, that it’s positively… engineered.
You know the ol’ diddle me once routine; yet virtually every university equipped with engineering professors seems eager to be taken again and again by the time-honored get-rich-off-your-grant-by-setting-up-a-business-and-shunting-the-grant-funds-to-it. U Conn even let Cui and Shi (apparently there are yet more professors in their department who will be named; similar last names to Cui and Shi will almost certainly mean a UD limerick) start their business on campus, giving them all sorts of university perks and inducements to do so. The guys and gals then turned around and allegedly stole NSF grant money – large quantities of it – by having that money go to their company.
Not only were the purchases initiated by UConn faculty “who had a significant interest in AquaSeNT,” but two of the purchase requisitions they signed indicated, “I have no financial or other beneficial interest in the vendor,” the auditors wrote.
OTOH, there’s a simple explanation here. The guys and gals say they didn’t read the conflict of interest language in the grant before signing off on it. I mean, if they’d known… (You will know this as the George Costanza Move.) Plus they were pressed for time and all.
U Conn’s in deep doodoo too, because they didn’t inform the State Auditors office of the NSF investigation. I guess U Conn’s been pressed for time as well.
May 2nd, 2015 at 6:54PM
FWIW–Corruption isn’t just about money, it’s also about secret rules that separate insiders, or potential insiders, from the outsiders who won’t play ball.