District of Columbia officials agreed to pay more than $1.7 million to the federal government to settle claims that city school officials bilked the feds out of millions in grants to help students who didn’t exist.
School officials took in millions of public dollars from grants designed to help the children of migrant farmers and fishers over decades. The problem was that a 2005 audit revealed that there were no such children in the school system.
The settlement filed Friday allows the District to pay off the federal government without admitting any wrongdoing.
It closes one sordid chapter for the city’s troubled $1 billion school system, but it may not be the end of the story. After The Examiner reported on the migrant fraud and a host of other problems in the system, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. convened a special task force to look for waste, fraud and abuse. The task force, led by top anti-corruption prosecutor Steve Durham, continues its work.
This settlement allows the District to get out of millions of dollars in potential damages and avoid a lengthy trial. The False Claims Act would have allowed the feds to pursue up to three times the amount of stolen money as damages, plus another $11,000 per offense.
The migrant education funds were created by Congress in 1966. They were designed to get health care, tutoring and other supplementary services to children whose parents moved from farm to farm or fishery to fishery in search of seasonal work.
Millions went out under the program for decades, but the federal government rarely audited states’ books. In 2003, that changed when grantees were required to hire outside auditors to check the program and report back to the Department of Education.
At its peak, D.C. was claiming up to 971 migrant children per year even though the city has no farms, orchards or fisheries to speak of. In 2005, the city claimed there were 333 migrant children in the school system. But an independent audit determined that 144 of the children couldn’t be found and the other 189 didn’t meet the definition of migrant children. It was a 100 percent error rate.
Migrant fraud settlement
- City pays $1.75 million in fines and damages
- Admits no wrongdoing
- D.C. took in $3.8 million in migrant education grants since 1994
