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Financial fraud at California community colleges – Daily News
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed California’s fiscal mismanagement in countless ways, most spectacularly in the payment of more than $30 billion – some estimates put the total as high as $55 billion – in fraudulent unemployment benefits. But another category of fraud could quickly reach almost as high numbers unless more is done to stop it.
We are referring to the enrollment of large numbers of “bots” in California community college classes and their apparent ease in obtaining financial aid, even though they are fake students.
One of this column’s co-authors discovered this surprising development as a criminal justice professor at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, part of the Los Angeles Community College District. In September 2021, the Los Angeles Times reported that fraudulent community college applications had increased to at least 65,000 in just a few months. It could be much worse now.
In April, CalMatters reported that an official in the state chancellor’s office told the publication that in January of this year, 25% of applicants to the state’s community college system were suspected of being fraudulent. The number of fake students applying “has gone up like crazy” over the past year, according to a Kern Community College District official.
CalMatters made a Public Records Act request for specific data on fraudulent applications to the California Community College Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), which oversees 116 individual schools. But the data provided was too generalized to be useful. Instead, CalMatters received combined system-wide data from September 2021 to January 2024. It showed that “colleges received nearly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave the fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid.” help.”
The true dimensions of the fraud are likely to significantly exceed these numbers because, as the CalMatters investigation concluded, compliance with the Community College system’s reporting requirements is patchy at best.
In September 2021, CCCCO required monthly reports on fraud screening. But a year after the required start date, some colleges had still not met, while others regularly missed reporting deadlines.
Admittedly, this is a difficult problem to solve. Enrollment has been declining at the state’s community colleges and funding is tied to enrollment. This could give school administrators a financial incentive to look the other way and not investigate fraudulent enrollments too aggressively.
Another problem arises from the shift to distance learning, which persisted after the pandemic. Even if it were the responsibility of teachers to ensure that their students were not fake – a dubious proposition at best – it is difficult for faculty members to verify that students are real when they appear only as empty rectangles on a Zoom screen.
For teachers, there is a downside to raising the issue of student bots. If they identify so many bots that their own classes are cancelled, their paychecks will be at risk. In one district, this happened on more than one occasion.
But in light of this problem, it should not be too much to ask public agencies, including community colleges, to verify the identity of applicants before granting them financial aid or other benefits. California taxpayers cannot afford to support legions of fraudsters.
The state legislature must order an audit of the California Community Colleges application system, including financial aid applications. The State Auditor’s Office can obtain the necessary records and make recommendations to ensure that California students receive the tuition and financial assistance they are entitled to and that fraudsters cannot.
Jon Coupal is the president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. Kim Rich is a professor of Criminal Justice at Los Angeles Pierce College and consults on fraudulent student enrollment issues.