State Auditor Releases CIRM Report

The California State Auditor this morning released its report on the California stem cell agency. Here is its summary of the highlights. We will have more on this later today. The full report can be found here.

"The institute identified long-term research priorities and considered the industry's best practices to create its strategic plan, but it has yet to implement a process to assess annual progress toward attaining its strategic goals.

"A task force formulated draft policies for revenue sharing through a public deliberative process but, because of a lack of documentation, we could not independently evaluate any analyses of the information on which the task force members based their revenue-sharing policies.

"Although it has a grants administration policy for academic and nonprofit institutions, the institute is still developing a for-profit policy and is still implementing a monitoring process to ensure that grantees comply with the terms of their grants.

"The institute's recent policy revisions addressed our contracting concerns, but not all of our travel reimbursement concerns.

"The salary survey conducted by the institute and the compilation of the salary data collected contained enough errors, omissions, and inconsistencies that the institute cannot ensure that the salaries for certain positions comply with the requirements of the law."