Crafting Compliant Data: Enacting Aggregate Spend Transparency in the US Life Science Industry

Abstract

In the early 2010s, the passing of US legislation mandating that health care manufacturers publicly disclose their financial relationships with physicians gave rise to the field of aggregate spend. Within corporate compliance offices in the life sciences, aggregate spend professionals track updates to transparency legislation, develop protocols for reporting data on their company's interactions with and payments to health care providers, and monitor data to assess the company's compliance with relevant laws. Drawing on observations of discourse at professional events, I argue that the labor of producing compliant transparency data defies rationalization even as it seeks to abide by laws and regulations. The article extends anthropological theorizing of compliance by showing how aggregate spend professionals carve out certain agencies to comply in strategic ways. It further contributes to the anthropological understanding of labor in the data economy by showing how the work of these data professionals, while undervalued in the organization, invisibilized by the logics of the transparency program, and often presumed to involve routinized labor, in fact involves considerable care and discernment.