Dr. Scott Stanley was found to have billed regulators for testing services he directed staff not to perform, among other issues
by Natalie Voss

Updated:Sep 18, 2024
Two reports released Sept. 17 by the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit and the University of Kentucky on the ongoing investigations into the university’s Equine Analytical Chemistry Lab were packed full of startling revelations. Both reports focused primarily on the many alleged deficiencies of lab director Dr. Scott Stanley and raise broad, serious questions about the integrity of his operation. Officials say Stanley is now also under investigation by federal law enforcement officials and that the case has been referred to University of Kentucky Police.

In February, HIWU and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority stopped sending samples to the UK lab for analysis after being alerted to personnel issues there. HIWU subsequently discovered that Stanley had charged them for a test he hadn’t actually performed, and alerted the university to this finding. The University of Kentucky, which was already looking into human resources issues with Stanley, then opened its own, parallel investigation into the lab’s activities.

Prior to this suspension from HIWU, Stanley’s lab was testing Thoroughbred racing samples from Kentucky and Florida. He’d also been testing sport horse samples from the United States Equestrian Federation and from non-Thoroughbred racing breeds in Kentucky.

You can read HIWU’s investigative report here and the university’s internal audit report here. Although there is some overlap in the contents, there are different revelations in each.

There’s a lot to unpack from both reports, and context is important in both groups’ findings.

Note: There is some jargon that’s important to understand when reading these reports. When a blood or urine sample is analyzed by a lab, it is first subjected to “screening,” in which it’s run against a huge catalogue of potential substances. If anything matches, the same lab will do what’s called a “confirmatory analysis” before declaring the sample is positive for a given drug at a given concentration. “Split sample” or “B sample” analysis is performed later, at a trainer’s request, and is done by a different lab than the one that called the positive. Confirmatory analysis is more rigorous than screening, and it’s not uncommon for a screening test to find something which turns out not to be confirmed, resulting in the sample being declared clear.

Here are my takeaways:

-All of this probably could have been avoided, for a while, if Stanley had played a little nicer with others. According to HIWU’s report, HIWU officials had difficulty getting communication from Stanley, and when they did, it was often less than professional. They started getting complaints from Florida’s Gaming Control Commission and racetrack stakeholders that they were having trouble communicating with him, too.

HIWU’s report said “Stanley’s poor conduct was raised with his superiors at the university on multiple occasions, and they provided assurances it would be addressed. Unfortunately, the issues remained unresolved.”

HIWU began rerouting Florida samples away from the UK lab on Feb. 12 of this year due to Stanley’s ongoing scraps with stakeholders there, and threatened to terminate its own relationship with him. The next day, they learned the university was conducting its own “human resources-related investigation of Stanley” and he’d been removed from the lab. That’s when HIWU stopped sending Kentucky samples there, too.

On Feb 23, HIWU was in the process of picking up the loose ends that were still at Stanley’s lab and asked remaining personnel about a leftover blood sample from November 2023. A different HIWU lab had done a screening test which alerted to the possible presence of EPO, and HIWU had asked Stanley to do confirmatory analysis on it. He had previously told the organization he’d analyzed the sample once but was still working on it. HIWU officials were surprised when the employee they contacted found the blood sample intact, still sealed in the lab’s refrigerator. It had never been opened.

That finding started the avalanche.

-Turns out, there’s a lot Stanley said he was doing that he wasn’t. The biggest problem is certainly that although he claimed he was screening samples for EPO, he wasn’t. The machinery he would have used to do the testing was “inoperable” – a fact which wasn’t communicated to HIWU.

The lab was following an “outdated testing specification” when testing for methamphetamine, and Stanley ordered staff not to do confirmatory analysis for meth, declaring any flagged samples negative. The lab was only testing for cobalt on “limited days per month” and “did not perform cobalt testing on samples from all racetracks from which UK-EACL received samples,” according to HIWU. It was also not testing to standards for the banned substance glaucine.

When the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium sent a double-blind proficiency sample that contained the corticosteroid triamcimolone to Stanley’s lab, a screening test did detect the drug, but Stanley ordered staff not to do further analysis and reported the sample as negative.

The lab also apparently found evidence of furosemide at concentrations that were too high for certain types of races (stakes races and 2-year-old races prohibit furosemide closer than 48 hours prior to post time), and also reported those as negative without further confirmation.

HIWU’s report also indicates the lab didn’t have positive control samples for detomidine, butorphanol, xylazine, diclofenac, and omeprazole, among others, which means they didn’t have known samples of those drugs to compare a sample against during confirmatory analysis.

-Stanley kicked up both false negatives and false positives, but based on what we know right now, officials have found only a small number of each. HIWU’s report found two false positives and two false negatives from Stanley’s lab. HISA/HIWU officials would not disclose the identities of the trainers impacted by either set of tests, but would say that the two false positives were for diclofenac and phenylbutazone, that they had not resulted in suspensions for either trainer, and that both cases would be dropped and any financial loss restored to the trainers in question.

The false negatives were discovered when HIWU took every remaining sample it could from the lab and had them all reanalyzed. One false negative was for an undisclosed Class B controlled medication in a post-race sample, while the other was a Class C substance in a sample pulled from a horse trying to clear off the vet’s list. HIWU still has to send notice to the trainers impacted, so their identities haven’t been revealed yet. HIWU’s report indicated that impacted covered persons may be able to reduce or eliminate their suspensions or fines because of the long delay in getting the results, although the organization cannot negate any disqualification of results or assignment of penalty points, as those consequences are automatic.

In total, HIWU requested documentation for 146 samples for which it believed the UK lab found a potential issue in screening but may not have done confirmatory analysis and instead told HIWU the samples were negative. In some cases, they found the choice not to do confirmatory analysis was justified (in cases where an out-of-competition sample showed potential presence of a therapeutic drug that’s not prohibited out-of-competition, for example). In others, they found the lab had done confirmatory analysis after all. That ruled out 55 samples and left them with 91 samples of concern. Of those 91, all but 36 had been discarded since they’d been declared clear – which is acceptable, by HIWU’s retention policies. Besides the four samples above, HIWU found no other issues.

UK’s report said its officials evaluated 240 samples and found four which “lacked results documentation” in the lab’s computer system. Two were reported to HIWU as positives, and the other two were sent to a different lab at UK for further analysis. It’s not clear whether there’s overlap between UK’s problematic four samples and the false negatives and false positives found by HIWU.

-Access to test results and reporting were a pretty loose ship. UK’s investigation spent a lot of time looking at security of information at the lab, which the UK Internal Audit team found was wildly inadequate. Staff at the lab used a shared login to access the results management system for test results, and former staffers were still able to log in to the system after they no longer worked at the lab. Further, if someone on staff (including Stanley) wanted to change the results of a test logged into the system, there would be no way for anyone to tell.

Computers and other tech equipment wasn’t tracked or managed, so if an item with access to the system vanished, it could have easily gone undetected.

An IT employee at the lab had also created a second server to store results information for the purposes of reporting it to HIWU, creating another opportunity for someone to access and edit those results undetected.

In what’s apparently a departure from ideal lab practices, Stanley also had access to samples during every part of the process, from the time coolers arrived from the racetrack straight through to the entry of test results in the lab’s computers. He was the only person who reported test results to HIWU.

-Then, there’s the potential conflicts of interest. One of the human resources issues that was no doubt on the university’s radar was the discovery that Stanley was in a relationship with an employee. UK’s investigative report named Natalie Fawkes, former trainer and daughter of trainer David Fawkes, as the employee for whom Stanley created a position in the lab in October 2023.

Fawkes saddled her last runner in April 2019 and was based at Gulfstream Park, where David Fawkes still runs. Evidently, she disclosed her numerous racing industry connections on her job application and was hired anyway, but UK took issue with the fact the personal relationship to Stanley was not disclosed. The report included documentation of a trip Fawkes and Stanley took to the 2024 Eclipse Awards, as well as a letter Stanley wrote to request Fawkes be excused from a lecture at Eastern Kentucky University to work on a “live animal project” at the lab during the time UK auditors say they were in fact at the Eclipse celebration in Florida.

HIWU’s report made clear that Fawkes (who HIWU did not name in their own report) had access to the external sample numbers assigned to samples collected at racetracks and could have matched them with the internal laboratory code that is assigned to samples during the testing process to keep them anonymous. There’s no evidence, according to HIWU, that samples from horses competing for her “close relative” were handled inappropriately.

UK’s report also uncovered a relationship Stanley had with Thermo Finnigan, a tech company that makes laboratory equipment, which he failed to properly disclose.

-This is just the stuff we know about so far. In a conference call with media on Tuesday, HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus said the issues HIWU’s investigation uncovered were “preexisting” issues “we inherited,” suggesting strongly that this type of activity by Stanley may have predated HIWU’s use of the lab.

To test samples in HISA jurisdictions, a lab had to be accredited by the Racing Medication and Testing Consortium and also stipulate to certain requirements with regard to testing turnaround time and volume. UK fit that bill in June 2023, when HIWU took over post-race and out-of-competition testing for most of the country’s Thoroughbred races.

But before that, Stanley’s lab was testing samples for Kentucky racing (all breeds) and for the U.S. Equestrian Federation. In fact, the lab was created to coincide with his hiring.

According to the UK audit report, Stanley was appointed lab director Dec. 1, 2018, though his own curriculum vitae indicates he was a professor in December 2018 and started as lab director July 8, 2019. In May 2019, the university announced that a $3 million fund would be dedicated to building a drug testing lab and associated research program with Stanley at the helm. The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission switched its drug testing over to the lab in April 2021. The lab had begun contracting with the United States Equestrian Federation in 2019.

Prior to his move to the University of Kentucky, Stanley was head of the Kenneth L. Maddy Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, which was responsible for testing California post-race and other samples and which is now part of HIWU’s network of labs.

It’s unclear at this point what issues may have started when, but both reports certainly raise likely-unanswerable questions about what other tests may have been compromised.

-This could just be the beginning for Stanley. Lazarus confirmed Tuesday that federal law enforcement officials are looking into Stanley’s activities, though it’s not clear which branch of the federal government is investigating him or what their focus is. The university announced that it has referred the case to UK Police for potential criminal charges, but did not say where that investigation stands.

UK also announced it would pursue termination of Stanley as a result of its findings – an unusual move for a tenured faculty member.

Stanley was removed from his position as lab director early in the investigations, but is still on the state university’s payroll in his capacity as faculty.

UK’s Internal Audit team noted it is still investigating the financials for the lab, and results of that investigation will be provided separately. HIWU noted that it is also keeping its investigation open, although the organization believes it has seized all relevant and available evidence in the case.

HISA is asking the university to reimburse it for approximately $1 million for services it paid for but were never actually provided by Stanley’s lab. The lab handled between 8,000 and 9,000 samples in the eight months it tested samples under HIWU.