Legislators are looking for an investigation of CA Community fraud

From Adam EchelmanCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Nine Republican US Representatives are calling on US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon and US Prosecutor Pam Bondi yes Research of fraud with financial assistance at California Community Colleges. In a separate letter sent on Wednesday, the State Member of the Assembly Blanca Rubio, Westernasked the state to conducts its own audit On the subject.

This order Out of $ 10 million Federal Financial Aid and over $ 3 million in state aid in the last 12 months.

In his letter on April 11, to Bondi and McMahon, who cites Calmatters reporting, Republican representatives in California say that investigating fraud in community colleges in California should be part of President Donald Trump’s constant efforts to “limit the wasteful federal costs”.

California Chancellor of California Colleges “has not contacted the US Department of Education or by the US Prosecutor General for an investigation,” said Chris Ferguson, one of the office’s executive vice president, in an email to CalMatters on Thursday.

Assemblymber Rubio’s letter calls for a state audit that will look at the scope of fraud and efforts to prevent it. State legislators will decide this June whether to pursue this audit, which may take years.

California Colleges in the Community are competing to deal with fake students and fraud with financial assistance YearsS Last spring, CalMatters reported that cheaters continued to avoid discovery And that community colleges report that they have distributed over $ 5 million in federal funds and over $ 1.5 million in state and local aid. Earlier this month found Calmatters The problem is only to get worseS

“Allowing this increase in fraud not to be addressed is negligently to the college college system, as these bad participants take away opportunities from real students in affected courses such as accounting, nurses, etc.,” writes California Republics in their letter.

While students, teachers and administrators of California college agreed that this is a serious and growing problem, they ask whether the investigation or audit will lead to a better solution.

Fraud is a “legal concern,” said Larry Galio, President of the California College in the Community, which represents the interests of the state 73 community areas in the community – but the letter to the Education Division and the Prosecutor General is “unwavering” and “just flat wrong”, claiming that it remained unstable.

California has allocated over $ 150 million since 2022 to improve cybersecurity in its colleges in the Community.

“The accusation of the victim and then the reduction of resources to the subjects themselves who are trying to fight fraud is not a political approach that will be effective,” Galizio said.

Busy with the number of fake students in their classes, “some of our teachers feel that they have shouted in the void,” says Stephanie Goldman, CEO of the Association of the Faculty of California Community Colleges. She said federal control is particularly ironic, given that the Trump administration has dismantled the US Department of Education and makes it difficult to investigate fraud.

Representative Young Kim – who turned her area to Orange County in 2020 – led the effort to write the letter to the Congress. Her spokesman Cali Stock declined to respond directly to criticism when Calmatters asked them. She said Kim still learns about the issue and that “California has a long history of taxpayer abuse.”

Main Priority: Obtaining money to students in need

Following Trump’s office in January, the federal government He regularly criticizes colleges and universities in CaliforniaS The US Department of Justice is Stanford Investigation, UC Berkeley, Ucla and UC Irvine За твърдение, че дискриминира студентите в името на „разнообразието, справедливостта и приобщаването“ – въпреки че утвърдителните действия са незаконни в Калифорния от 1996 г. Администрацията продължава и след многобройни кампуси на UC, както и щат Сакраменто и колежа Санта Моника, за да се твърди, че е разрешил, че е разрешил, че е разрешил, че е разрешил, както и да се твърди, че се твърди “Anti -Semitic harassment and discriminationS ”

California is struggling by working with other countries to file numerous lawsuits, such as trying to stop the Trump administration from cancellation of federal subsidies and another to prevent Dismantling the US Department of Education.

But in this case, the call to investigate higher education in California for fraud derives from the elected representatives of California, not from Trump or his office. Kim’s spokesman did not explain whether Trump administration officials would actually continue to investigate.

For Ivan Hernandez, a student at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, fraud is a low priority. Hernandez is the president of the Community Student Association, and although he said suspects that some of the students in his online courses are fake – or at least use AI to submit tasks – he is more concerned about the homelessness and uncertainty of food concerned about affecting Half of about 2 million students in the California Community.

Financial assistance is supposed to pay for training, but low -income students pay little or no training in California, so money goes directly to their pockets to compensate for the high country price for housing and food. Most students who attend community colleges in California are low -income and work in parts or full -time.

Ferguson, with the State Chancellor, said it was “essential to emphasize” that many fraudulent students were stopped before they could enroll. “For the nanoscopic number of criminals who went through the application stage and moved at the enrollment stage, an even less number was able to disrupt the financial aid stage,” he said.

“The fraud for financial assistance in the California Community College System is extremely low compared to billions of dollars of state and federal aid, paid-about 0.21% in 2023-24, which means that 99.8% of financial assistance was paid to real students in our system.”

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.