FDA: Doctors don't disclose conflicts of interest? We don't really care

According to a NYTimes article, government investigators have reported that the FDA doesn’t seem to care much about the financial disclosure of doctors who participated in clinical trials of medication and diagnostic devices. Then get this:

Moreover, the investigators say, agency officials told them that trying to protect patients from such conflicts was not worth the effort. (Despite the fact that the FDA’s rules require it.)

The article goes on to say that in 42 percent of clinical trials, the FDA did not receive financial disclosure forms that might report conflicts of interest and never followed up on them. In 31 percent of the trials in which the forms were received, “agency reviewers did not document that they looked at the information.” And then, in 20 percent of the cases in which doctors disclosed significant financial conflicts—”neither the FDA nor the sponsoring companies took any action to deal with the conflicts.”

Apparently, the NIH has been investigated for the same thing and government investigators came to the same conclusion as in the FDA case.