When Do Pharmaceutical Companies Tend to Misspell Their Own Names?

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ProPublica reports that its previous analyses of how much drug companies have been secretly paying doctors was difficult to get right. Many drug companies have been having a surprising tendency to submit huge swaths of their data to the federal government’s Sunshine Act database with misspellings of the names of their own companies and drugs.

“Forest Laboratories misspelled its depression drug, Fetzima, as ‘Fetziima’ 953 times — in more than one-third of all the reports on the drug,” reports ProPublica. “Medical device company Amedica Corp. sometimes called its Preference screw system ‘Preferance.'” The misspellings meant that it was far more difficult to track how much had really been paid by whom, to whom, and for what.

Why Pharma Payments to Doctors Were So Hard to Parse (ProPublica, January 22, 2015)

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4 COMMENTS

    • We have the criminals in charge of the world right now, our founding fathers warned us of them:

      “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered…I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies… The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson

      The pharmaceutical industry would be among the “corporations that will grow up around them.”