The University of Maryland, College Park will pay $500,000 to resolve allegations that faculty members failed to disclose funding from two Chinese companies on their proposals for federal research grants.

The payment comes among growing concerns in the U.S. of excessive involvement of foreign entities in American academic research.

“International collaboration is essential to pursuing the frontiers of science,” said France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, in an open letter. “Our science and engineering enterprise, however, is put at risk when other governments endeavor to benefit from the global research ecosystem without upholding the values of openness, transparency, and reciprocal collaboration.”

University of Maryland Vice President for Research Gregory F. Ball said in a statement that the settlement isn’t an admission of wrongdoing by either the school or its staff.

“The University has consistently maintained, based on its own investigation and an independent investigation by outside counsel, that the nondisclosures were the result of good faith interpretations of agency disclosure guidance or unintentional clerical errors,” Ball said.

The undisclosed funding came from two Chinese companies, both of which have been viewed with skepticism in the U.S.

Taobao, an online marketplace, is currently on the U.S. government’s Notorious Markets list, which compiles examples of online and physical markets with connections to piracy or counterfeiting. Taobao is owned and operated by Alibaba, the Chinese counterpart to Amazon. Huawei, a technology company, is effectively banned from conducting business in the U.S.

The funding disclosures were allegedly absent from proposals for five research grants that three professors received from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army.

When submitting proposals for federal grants, principal investigators — the faculty members in charge of specific research projects — are responsible for disclosing all sources of funding, foreign and domestic.

“Complete and accurate disclosures are essential to federal agencies that make decisions on awarding federal grants,” said Erek L. Barron, U.S. attorney for the district of Maryland. “Those individuals and universities that knowingly fail to do so skew the grant awarding process in their favor and will be held accountable.”

Concerns over Chinese influence in academia have landed the University of Maryland in hot water before, when it was revealed that a computer science professor there had partnered with Alibaba to develop urban surveillance software, as reported by the Daily Beast. One of the research projects involved in that payment is titled “Large-Scale Behavior Learning for Dense Crowds.”

The payment is not the only one of its kind. Stanford University and others have made similar payments in the past.