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Watchdog: From Fake Students To Disney Cruises, K-12 Fraudsters Stole $225 Million From Taxpayers Over 7 Years

‘When school administrators with access to funds go unchecked, embezzling and misusing public money, it’s a loss for the students.’

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Fraudsters in the public school system stole more than $225 million in taxpayer dollars over a seven-year period, Open the Books revealed in a report released Saturday.

The report details fraud occurring in 24 states and Puerto Rico, from the West Coast of California to the rural mountains of West Virginia, showing how public school fraud is a prevalent issue across the whole nation.

“When school administrators with access to funds go unchecked, embezzling and misusingpublic money, it’s a loss for the students. If it’s in a smaller district, the waste, fraud and abuse impacts in such a profound way that it may take years to recover,” the report stated. Open the Books is a nonprofit, nonpartisan government watchdog organization that “operate[s] the largest private database of public spending in human history.”

Open the Books and the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a nonprofit focused on promoting responsible fiscal public policy, found that fraudsters only repaid 30 percent ($67 million) of the total $225 million stolen after the OIG “ordered restitution” from some of the criminals.

Open the Books collaborated with SFOF to sift through the Department of Education Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports to calculate the total amount of recorded education fraud since 2019. The groups looked through more than 90 cases of fraud where “schemers were rigging bids, billing for supplies they never purchased, embezzling and more,” Open the Books said.

In one instance of mass fraud by a single individual, California school Executive Director Janis Bucknor confessed to stealing more than $3 million during a five-year period. She spent the cash on “personal travel, restaurants, internet shopping, and private school tuition for her children,” and most notably, over $220,600 on Disney cruises, Disney theme parks, and other Disney-related products.

The state with the most fraud was Indiana, where a single scheme resulted in $44 million in taxpayer dollars never making it to schoolchildren. OIG reported that the administration at Indiana Virtual School and Indiana........

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