Paige to Tackle Fraud at Education Dept.

Cleaning up waste, fraud, and abuse at the Education Department will be “the most urgent departmental matter,” Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige said at a news conference in April.

To take on the problems, Mr. Paige announced that he had selected eight senior managers at the department to develop a plan to fix weaknesses in its financial management. Those weaknesses, revealed in audits, have left the agency vulnerable to fraud. The “strike team” will be led by John P. Higgins Jr., a senior official in the department’s Inspector General’s Office. “Every dollar we waste on fraud or mismanagement is a dollar that could be used for teaching our children,” Mr. Paige said.

At a Congressional hearing in April, the department’s inspector general, Lorraine Lewis, revealed that the agency had lost track of at least $450-million in the past three years. Much of the money was lost in duplicate payments to grant recipients, states, and contractors. But some of it, she said, was stolen or improperly spent by department employees and contractors.

The department also has come under fire from Republican lawmakers for not receiving a “clean audit” from an independent accounting firm in each of the past three years.

Mr. Paige said he expected that the work of the senior managers would lead to significant improvements, and that the agency would obtain a “clean audit” within 18 months. He also said he planned to strengthen the management and oversight of the federal student-aid programs so that they no longer appear, as they have for the past decade, on the list that the General Accounting Office compiles of federal programs that are at the highest risk of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Mr. Paige refused to assign blame for past mismanagement, saying that “looking for fault” was “a waste of energy.”

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican who has held hearings on allegations of financial mismanagement at the department, had no such misgivings. In a news release, he took swipes at the department’s leadership under the secretary’s predecessor, Richard W. Riley.

“For too long, Secretary Riley and his staff made excuses for the department’s failures rather than taking decisive action,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “I am confident that Secretary Paige will devote the necessary resources to fix the problems as quickly as possible.”

Former department leaders denied the charges, saying that they had taken accusations of fraud very seriously.

http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Page: A27