LAUSR

In this month's issue of European Urology, Carlisle and associates [1] report on their analysis of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures by authors of 13 guidelines published by the American Urological Association (AUA). They compared the AUA COI disclosures with data from the Open Payments website (https://www.cms.gov/openpayments/) and the Dollars to Docs website (https://projects.propublica.org/ docdollars/). The authors reported that among 54 author disclosures, 20 (37%) were inaccurate, and suggest that there is “a need for more stringent enforcement of the AUA disclosure policy.” We join the authors in acknowledging the vital role that COI disclosures play in creating fair and unbiased clinical guidelines and in the user's perception of the same. We are pleased that outside groups are concerned about COI relationships for clinical guidelines. We respect the authors’ quest for an objective and verifiable “source of truth” related to COI disclosures. Nonetheless,we are disappointed that they used the inaccurate and unverifiable data sources of the Open Payments and Dollars to Docs websites, and, moreover, have implied that the websites are the gold standard and therefore any discrepancy means that guideline authors are lying. We wish to underscore that the USA is the world leader in cataloging industry relationships with physicians. More to the point, the AUA is a leader in this area. AUA policies have undergone continual revision since first approved in 2008, early in the history of COI policies. AUA disclosure is