Conflicts of interest

When an assessment round asks assessors to declare conflicts of interest, each conflict an assessor declares is listed under Assess > Conflicts of interest for you to revoke or confirm.

Before you start

Conflicts are declared only in rounds with Assessors declare any Conflict of Interest before assessing turned on. The help text assessors see starts from your organisation's Conflict of interest help text.

Review a conflict

Each row names the application and the assessor, and when they declared it. Select View Comment to read what the assessor wrote.

• Revoke the conflict if it does not stop them assessing. Select Revoke, enter a Comment and select Confirm. The assessor's access to the application is restored and they are told the conflict was revoked; your comment is not sent to them.
• Confirm the conflict to keep the application closed to the assessor for good. Select Confirm Conflict, enter a Comment and select Confirm Conflict. It cannot be revoked afterwards.

Revoked and confirmed conflicts show who resolved them and when, with View Revoke Comment or View Confirmation Comment.

Automatic recusals

A conflict made by one of your independence rules shows COI Recused and the rule's name beside its status. The same COI Recused mark appears beside Declared Conflict on All Assessments, the round's Assessments list and the assessment's own page. Use Declared by to list only the assessors' own declarations or only the automatic ones.

Every row shows its recusal period: "Recused from" the date it was declared "to close of round" while it stands, or to the date it was revoked.

Declaration details and management actions

When the round asks for structured declarations, View Comment also shows the relationship, its direction, how serious it is, and whether it was declared before or during assessing.

To record what was done about a declared or confirmed conflict, select Record management action, choose Recused, Secondary review, Escalated or No action required, add an optional Note and select Record. A new action replaces the last one; both stay in the audit log. The action shows in View Comment.

Rule matches

Select Independence rule matches above the list to see every time a rule matched an assessor to an application: the rule, the assessor, the application, the round, what the rule did and when. A match on an assessor who had already declared no conflict leaves them untouched and is logged.

An application cannot be assigned to an assessor who has a conflict with it that has not been revoked.

See also

• Assignments
• Independence rules