Few universities make required reports to the government about the financial conflicts of their researchers, and even when such conflicts are reported, university administrators rarely require those researchers to eliminate or reduce these conflicts, government investigators found.

In a report expected to be made public on Thursday, Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, said 90 percent of universities relied solely on the researchers themselves to decide whether the money they made in consulting and other relationships with drug and device makers was relevant to their government-financed research.

And half of universities do not ask their faculty members to disclose the amount of money or stock they make from drug and device makers, so the potential for extensive conflicts with their government-financed research is often known only to the researchers themselves, the report concluded.

The report is the latest in a series of investigations that have found that conflicts of interest in academic research are at best lightly supervised. Federal rules require that researchers report to their universities any outside income that may conflict with government-financed research, much of which comes from the National Institutes of Health. Those rules also require universities to manage those conflicts in ways that protect patients and the integrity of research.