Do Conflict of Interest (COI) regulations keep you awake at night? You do the right thing but worry you’ll accidentally violate the rules. If so, you should check out the new FAQs issued by the U.S. Public Health Service and HHS that deal with recently revised Financial COI standards. They apply to NIH funding. Arranged topically, the questions indicate whether the institution, the individual, or both are responsible for compliance.

We all know what COI means, but it’s helpful to understand how the regulations define it: A Financial Conflict of Interest exists when the Institution, through its designated official(s), reasonably determines that an Investigator’s Significant Financial Interest is related to a NIH-funded research project and could directly and significantly affect the design, conduct or reporting of the NIH-funded research.

Although COI regulations can seem like a bureaucratic annoyance, especially when researchers are more rightly concerned with making discoveries that save lives, they help ensure objectivity, which the public requires of us. You, too, are the public.