Vietnam Government Inspectorate finds fraud in VNU research projects

The Government Inspectorate of Vietnam has identified signs of deception regarding two scientific research projects conducted at the University of Economics, a member of Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNU). The projects, which received 500 million VND each from the state budget, were found to have violations in contracting, acceptance, payment, and settlement processes.

In the first project, titled “Vietnam Annual Economic Report 2021,” inspectors found that subcontracting documents failed to accurately reflect all participating authors. While the project documentation listed only one author per topic, parts of the content overlapped with an annual report featuring 22 authors. Similarly, the second project, “Vietnam Annual Economic Report 2020,” was flagged for similar irregularities.

The project leaders admitted to the content overlaps and the discrepancies in authorship documentation. Following the inspection, the project leads have reportedly returned a total of more than 204 million VND to the university.