Grant fraud, should I bust my PhD advisor? tl;dr: Should I report this large grant fraud, and what consequences could it have for me?

For obvious reasons, I will try to maintain some anonymity here.

So I defended my thesis. Which was funded through a government grant.

In order to obtain this type of grant, a professor needs to cooperate with several other research organizations and privately-owned industries. Then it is required for some people to exchange between these places for extended periods of time. Relocate to a different place, live and work there.

So my industrious professor submitted all the required paperwork and received enough money to support multiple PhD students, post-docs and senior professors. However, almost none of them actually did any exchange. Instead, everyone just stayed at their home institutions.

Of course, I had no idea that the grant money was being mishandled until a monitoring meeting with the grant authorities that took place a long time after I started. All the other PhD students had no idea what was going on as well. We ended up making ridiculous statements about our accommodation, work hours, health insurance as the senior professors convinced us to lie about fictitious exchanges taking place.

The whole scheme is based on deliberate misinformation about people working at places they have never seen in their lives. I suspect a ton of papers and documents had been forged and submitted as evidence. The government thinks it's a research project with cooperation among multiple institutions. The only time we see each other is at set-up (pretended) conferences.

Naturally, all the documentation is kept secret, but a quick Google search would reveal that one can't simultaneously work at place x, and give lectures at place y, while x and y are hours of travel away. But again the people who control the grant money only check the paperwork they are provided. Is there a bogus employment contract in my name? I don't know but I have reasons to believe so.

Should I report this as a fraud?

There is an anti-fraud unit which should deal with it. This could, however, backfire in so many unimaginable ways. Forgery is rather a serious offense: a few PhD students and post-docs could end up being deported. More money is being awarded each year which could go to other researchers that are at least honest about what they spend it on. A funded PhD position is still available at my university, so more unsuspecting students will be involved.

I don't even know how I should approach this problem myself. It is an ethical dilemma as to whether I should support my supervisors. The procedure is definitely illegal, but the consequences could vary from not receiving future funding from the same source, to grant recovery (many millions of an unspecified currency) or even criminal charges. I can only speculate on what documents have been forged in the process, employment contracts, visa documents etc. A large number of involved researchers don't even live on the same continent, and that is where most of the money might go to. It is also very personal. Apart from being fooled with many false promises into writing a PhD, I did not sign up for, nor intended to, lie about living in a place I have never been to.
TLDR: You need a lawyer.



I think, ethically, speaking out is the right thing. Falsifying grants is despicable and has a very negative impact on science in general. It has happened to me multiple times that when I say in a pub that I am in science and that I got a grant people say things like "All those grants are just frauds to get money from the government/EU". I don't think I need to explain why this kind of perception hurts on both personal and systemic level.

Regarding your own well being, things are much more difficult. The fact is that you have willingly participated in a non-trivial fraud for a prolonged period of time. Speaking out will not erase this neither ethically nor legally.

You need to consult a lawyer (not an Internet law advice, a real lawyer). As pointed out in the comments - you may easily be considered a part of the fraud. You may want to check your country's whistleblower/cooperating defendant protection laws, but those (if existent) usually do not provide any strict protection - court will have to decide whether you will face charges. OTOH, if the scheme is revealed later without your involvement, you will be in much worse situation than if you had spoken.
You may also claim to have acted in good faith or under serious threat (losing employment). Once again, a lawyer should be able to tell you to what extent this may protect you under the relevant jurisdiction, given the specific circumstances (there is no simple general rule).

Be aware, that you are in trouble. I don't think there are so many grants of this kind and much fewer of them are being cheated like the one you speak about. There is a non-negligible chance that someone overseeing the project reads this post and may consider checking whether this isn't "his" project. Some other participant of the grant may read this as well and consider speaking out himself to get into a better situation. And as this sounds like a big and ongoing fraud, it may easily burst on its own - once people get too much used to bending rules they usually do not know when to stop.

This is not a "we used a questionable accounting trick to be able to buy a new device we really needed for research" kind of problem, there is no good intent, neither was the money used in the spirit of the grant.

EDIT: One more bad scenario in response to some of the comments. Let's suppose the fraud is exposed. Even if the funding agency does not initiate a criminal investigation and even if they cannot directly claim money from you (as your contract is probably with the uni) you still have trouble. Since the uni will likely have to return a large sum of money, they can file civil suit against the people involved in the fraud seeking financial compensation for the loss. As you have made false statements about accommodation and other stuff, this can easily include you.

EDIT 2: I would like to highlight a good point made in AndrejaKo's answer: If the corruption is sufficiently deep in the system, it might not be actually possible to bust your advisor (read the answer for detailed reasoning).