The point of an IRB is to act as an outside reviewer of _ethics_. IRBs aren't some checklist thing admin put in to protect the University's reputation, they exist as a direct reaction to huge amounts of unethical human experimentation occurring last century.
The point of an IRB is to stop you from nonconsentually sterilizing people. As long as the system stops that from happening, I don't care about the paperwork. It's not my concern.
The "ethical" issues with this study do not rise to the level that I care, so the only objection is that they didn't get the IRB to rubber stamp it beforehand, which I also don't care about.
