Should the NIH monitor conflicts of interest?

I read an interesting article in today's NY Times. Apparently, the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report suggesting that the NIH should do a better job of monitoring potential conflicts of interest. From the NY Times article:

The health institutes awarded more than $23 billion last year through over 50,000 competitive grants to more than 325,000 researchers at over 3,000 universities. Each grant typically underwrites only a part of the cost of the research at issue.

Universities are increasingly seeking other sources of income to support research, and drug and device makers have become an important resource. But blending these sources of financing can often present researchers with troubling conflicts of interest, and managing such conflicts has become dizzyingly complex.

Indeed, academic medicine has become so rife with conflicts of interests in recent years that the Food and Drug Administration has complained that it has difficulty finding experts for its advisory boards who do not have a conflict.

Most universities entirely trust their professors to report financial conflicts, and efforts to verify professors' filings are almost unheard of.

And I have to say ... I agree with the report - there should be more oversight. I'm not saying that collaborations between NIH funded labs and industry are bad. In fact I think that such collaborations are very fruitful for both academic labs and for industry. But I have heard a couple of horror stories about a slightly different type of conflict of interest. For example, I heard about one PI who funneled reagents and data from her NIH-supported lab to her company. All that work, which was paid for by taxpayers, was now being used for private interests, without the consent of the public. On top of it, the postdocs and gradstudents from that lab were screwed - they had to give away all that data and they lost all these reagents that they had developed over the course of months to years. Now I don't mind that researchers have their hands in both worlds, or that NIH funded science ends up helping launch small biotech companies, but the knowledge gained from these NIH-financed endeavours should be published in the scientific literature.