Two years ago, then-Washington Post reporter Lisa Rein and I kept hearing from sources that the venerable GI Bill program was marred by fraud. The sources said for-profit trade schools were generating a lot of complaints among veterans and that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wasn’t doing much about the problem.
Indeed, VA officials declined our requests to interview them about the issue. To investigate, The Post filed public records requests with VA and its Office of the Inspector General, seeking a complaint database and other data about the GI Bill program, as well as law-enforcement files from fraud investigations into 20 schools.
The government denied our requests, citing privacy concerns. We filed appeals under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but VA and its inspector general’s office rejected those, too. Finally, The Post sued in federal court, arguing that the public interest in whether the GI Bill program was being administered properly overrode the privacy rights of fraudsters and cheaters.
The legal process was slow, but over many months, the government released some of the databases and more than 8,000 pages of documents from 20 fraud investigations that resulted in criminal convictions or civil fines. I also reviewed more than 10,000 pages of federal court records and trial transcripts that shed further insight into how the scams worked. My Post colleague Andrew Ba Tran analyzed the data and found that unaccredited schools, on average, cost taxpayers more than accredited ones — and drew complaints from veterans at a rate nearly five times higher.
In addition, I traveled to Texas, California and Idaho to interview the former owners of four trade schools who had been convicted and sentenced to prison for fraud. All four were remarkably candid about systemic flaws with the GI Bill program and how it has been exploited because of poor oversight.
Here are a few takeaways:
Some schools charged sky-high tuition for extremely short courses
VA limits how much it will pay in tuition — currently $30,908 a year per student at most schools — but it has no standard for how long a course must last. Some for-profit trade schools exploited the loophole by charging sky-high rates for classes that took only a few days or weeks.
An “organic lawn care institute” charged $14,900 per student in tuition to teach veterans how to grow grass in a course that lasted just four or five days. Another trade school charged $18,500 in tuition to show veterans how to make fake rocks out of concrete. That course lasted eight days.
With ‘ghost’ schools, veterans were complicit in the scams
Operators of a dozen “ghost” schools were convicted or fined for offering phantom courses in which veterans could skip class or otherwise do no work. In those cases, the schools collected millions of dollars in tuition from VA — while veterans each pocketed between $1,500 and $4,000 a month in housing subsidies.
While some ghost-school owners and operators have gone to prison, veterans have almost never been prosecuted for participating in such ruses. The Post could identify only one case in the past decade in which veterans were criminally charged with swindling VA out of housing money by enrolling at a ghost school.
VA doesn’t require school owners to pass a background check
Under federal law, owners of unaccredited trade schools seeking to enroll veterans under the GI Bill must be of “good moral character and reputation” — but they’re not required to undergo an independent criminal background or credit check.
As a result, individuals with felony records or a history of fraud or tax evasion have won VA’s approval to train veterans. The Post interviewed the founder of a San Antonio vocational school that received $1.5 million in GI Bill funding, even though he previously pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court and described himself as a former drug dealer.
VA told The Post it has stepped up efforts to identify fraud
VA officials declined The Post’s interview requests and did not respond directly to a detailed list of written questions about problems with the GI Bill program.
In a statement, VA Press Secretary Quinn Slaven said The Post’s findings that more than $300 million has been lost to fraud during roughly the past decade represent “less than 0.3 percent of VA’s educational budget” during that period, “underscoring the fact that protecting Veterans and taxpayers from fraud is a top VA priority.”
Slaven said VA this year has created a tool that assigns a fraud risk score to schools and has started a Compliance, Investigations and Enforcement Division to spot fraud risks and refer cases to the inspector general’s office.
“VA is focused on protecting Veterans and taxpayers from fraud like never before,” he added.
Read more about the Post investigation
How predatory trade schools drained $300 million from the GI Bill and cheated veterans
Veterans in this GI Bill scam played along as trade schools pocketed millions
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