The Justice Department once accused Pacific College owners of running a student aid scam and sought ownership of the over $3 million that the FBI seized after a corruption investigation. The Education Department, the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and the FBI investigated a fraud scheme whereby Pacific College defrauded the ED of FSA (federal student aid) funding. For your information, Pacific College is a nursing school founded around 30 years ago in California’s Costa Mesa city.
The government probe revealed that the nursing college inflated grades, forged attendance information, and passed its students through a scheme in a way that kept a false academic progress standard. The standard not only made students continuously enrol themselves in that program but also sustained the incoming FSA funding flow.
As per former Assistant US Attorney Steven Welk, the college was also thought to have raised tuition fees unilaterally for many different students to eliminate repayments to them. The increase in the fees contributed to the college retaining a greater amount of the funding than it had the right to retain.
As per the past forfeiture complaint, the Federal Bureau of Investigations seized the funds from the bank accounts associated with college officials Marcus Tromp, William Woo, and William Nelson. FBI agents claimed that the college did the following things.
- Took almost $23 million as FSA funds from 2010 to 2017
- Maintained the inward flow of government funding by inappropriately relaxing admission requirements to recruit maximum students for the funding for defrauding the US federal aid program (FSA)
According to Welk, the nursing college should have enforced a requirement of tenth-grade reading standard for its incoming students as a minimum level. Instead, the college admitted candidates who were incapable of reading beyond a middle-school grade.
Welk told Judge Cormac Carney of the US District Court that the nursing college pushed unqualified and unprepared pupils through its program for their FSA money. It gave passing scores to a few students who failed in examinations, which let them persist with that program. It also improperly changed non-failing student scores. For instance, if one scored 60% on an examination, the instructors of the college would score it above 70% for them. If one scored 70 to 75%, then it would occasionally score the test at 100% too.
Federal Bureau of Investigations Agent Jessie Murray made a sworn statement to support the assertions of Welk. On the site of Pacific College, its officials claimed that they operated one of SoCal’s most premier vocational and nursing institutions.
According to Pacific College President William Nelson, it strived to equip and prepare pupils with professional expertise for a growing global society. The expertise included core elements such as critical thinking, ethics, leadership, and decision making.
The United States Marshals Service was possessing the seized funds when this story came in the May 2018 edition of OC Weekly. As of May 2018, there was no scheduled date for a legal hearing on the matter.
