BY WALTER PUTNAM

The Associated Press

A dean at Old Dominion University will be paid $190,000 as part of a settlement of a whistleblower lawsuit against his former employer.

Authorities said today that St. Louis University has agreed to pay Dr. Andrew Balas, former dean of SLU's School of Public Health, as part of the $1 million settlement.

Balas is now dean of the College of Health Sciences at ODU in Norfolk.

The government will dismiss the suit, which claims the school tried to defraud the government by overstating faculty time spent on projects involving federal grants.

Saint Louis University will be subject to increased scrutiny in annual audits of federally funded research, U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said.

Balas alleged in the initial lawsuit in May 2005 that supplemental income of some faculty members was inflated by claims of time they spent on grants received from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

An investigation revealed that grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Housing and Urban Development also were involved, with similar inflation of hours worked, Nahmias said.

Balas first tried to stop the improper billings within the university but was forced to resign for refusing to go along with them, said his attorney, Michael Sullivan.

"When everything fails, you eventually run out of options, and to fix things you do what you have to do. You have to stand up and defend academic values," Balas said in a telephone interview.

Sullivan said the university's evaluation of Balas' performance as dean was "100 percent positive" in 2003, one year after he was hired away from another school.

"Only weeks later -- after protests from university employees who were profiting from the unlawful payments and wanted more -- the university made sure Dean Balas knew that he was no longer welcome," Sullivan said.

Saint Louis University spokesman Clayton Berry issued a statement denying that the school schemed to defraud the government, but said it agreed to settle in order to avoid legal costs. The $1 million was a fraction of the $298 million the university received in research funding during the period in question, he said.

"In all instances, the researchers completed the research work for which they were reimbursed," the statement said. "The central dispute was the method for calculating reimbursement for extra time spent working on federal grants."