Our medical school administration has recently become aware that clinical
trial sponsors sometimes pay recruitment bonuses to our study
coordinators when they get in a pinch and need to accelerate enrollment.
These payments have been made directly to the coordinators (as
personal income) by the company, apparently with the knowledge of the PIs
(but not the administration).

The PIs feel these payments are an acceptable mechanism to reward
extraordinary effort from the coordinators, particularly in the
clinical environment, where incentive-based compensation is common.
The administration finds it unacceptable to have a third party making
direct payments to its employees for work done at the school.

We are formulating a recommendation on how to best handle these funds.
The options seem to be
 1.  Maintain as is -- direct payments by company to employee.
 2.  Decline bonus payments entirely.
 3.  School accepts bonuses as additional grant income.
 4.  School accepts bonuses and uses them to pay salary bonuses to
 coordinators.

I am interested in what other schools have done about these payments.
Are you aware of bonus payments made to your coordinators?
How have these funds been handled by your institution?
Do you have any institutional policy or guidelines addressing this issue?

I appreciate your input and will post a summary of the replies.

Julie Watson
Assistant Dean, Research Administration
Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University
xxxxxx@isnet.is.wfu.edu