I think the difficulty is that being invited to an academic meeting and given accommodation and dinner and transport reimbursement is a standard part of the job. I have reimbursed colleagues for thousands of dollars for flying to the UK long haul, staying in hotels and enjoying good conference dinners in return for their educational input to the conference. The difference is that the money was raised from paying delegate fees and educational grants from charities like Wellcome with no vested interest.
So being invited to a meeting in a comfortable environment is not necessarily a 'gift' or 'hospitality'. A meeting on Cook Island is probably not so different from a meeting in Canterbury for an Australian delegate. The room rates on Cook Island are high but where is the line to be drawn? It all boils down to who is doing the inviting and why - what alteration in behaviour on the part of the delegate might be expected to have preceded or followed this invitation?
In practice I think it would be impractical for medical academics to declare whenever they had expenses for meetings covered. But the situation is usually dealt with by the fact that delegates tend to have consultancy agreements with the relevant commercial interests if the source is commercial. So behind the party one would expect there to have been commercial consultancies that should be declared on publications. I think we know of those consultancies in fact. The party simply brings home to me just how close knit this group have been for a very long time.
I think there are two questions:
1) What counts as a gift/hospitality vs expenses. I don't see going to a conference as a gift as you say but having ones family paid for is. If the conference basically has 1 or 2 hours of talks per day then that is stretching it. If I travel with work such as to a conference then obviously I claim my expenses back but there are limits as to what is acceptable - for example, limits on meal prices, hotels and airfares. As you said I don't think that counts as hospitality. Although if I go to a conference I would be expected to be presenting a paper there. Sometimes conferences can end up in holiday resorts because good rates can be negotiated out of season so the cost of the cook island is not necessarily high. I think the line is drawn around a judgement that the event is a proper professional event rather than one with a light program and lots of entertainment. I suspect the tax office also have opinions on this they do on general expense reimbursement and if such expenses fall outside of their rules then they will tax expenses as gifts.
2) Transparency for those who are making or advising government on decisions. Civil servants are very careful (these days) around seeming to not take anything that could be aimed at influencing them or the advice they give. But it seems to me that academics sometimes give advice and this seems to be an area lacking in transparency at the moment. For example, if Wessely is giving advice to the MOD around mental health policy it seems to me that gifts, hospitality and expenses should be recorded and made public at least above a certain amount. The same with paid consultancies they should be declared where academics are helping make policy whether it appears as an explicit conflict of interest or not.
It is worth saying companies have started to get much more concerned about such things as well in part due to the SEC claiming down on things that could be seen on bribery. For example Glaxo were fined $20m by the SEC for a Chinese subsidiary that provided gifts, travel and shopping excursions and the Chinese authorities fined them $498m for bribing doctors
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...llion-sec-fine-over-bribing-chinese-officials . Even for drug companies that is big money. So I suspect things are changing a bit.
