[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 11321-11322]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              BOGUS COLLEGE DEGREES COST GOVERNMENT DEARLY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Chocola) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CHOCOLA. Mr. Speaker, tonight I rise in support and cooperation 
of my colleagues, the Washington Waste Watchers, who were here earlier 
this evening.
  I unfortunately come to the floor tonight to share another example of 
wasted taxpayer dollars. Mr. Speaker, according to a report released by 
the General Accounting Office in May, taxpayers have paid hundreds and 
thousands of dollars and, in reality, probably much, much more for 
Federal employees to obtain bogus degrees from unaccredited 
postsecondary schools, also known as diploma mills. These so-called 
diploma mills sell academic degrees based upon life experience, 
sometimes based on negligible academic work, and some require no 
academic work at all. They simply sell degrees for a price.
  The first 2 days of congressional hearings on fake degree-granting 
institutions, the director of GAO special investigations testified the 
data collected on just two of those diploma mills show Federal payments 
of almost $170,000 for bogus degrees. He also said the number is likely 
an underestimate, even for those two institutions; and he expects a 
broader investigation of nearly 140 known diploma mills would reveal 
many more cases of federally financed phony degrees.
  The GAO report found that 463 Federal employees, including 28 senior-
level officials, have listed diploma mill degrees on their resumes. And 
one of those senior-level officials even received a Federal tuition 
reimbursement of nearly $2,000 in connection with a phony degree from a 
bogus school.
  Mr. Speaker, Democrats want to raise our tax to pay for more of this. 
That is just the tip of the iceberg because the GAO only received data 
from eight government agencies. The other agencies could not even 
respond to the inquiry. As an example, the Department of Health and 
Human Services told the GAO that it could not produce records of 
employee education payments because it maintains records in five 
different accounting systems. It has no way to differentiate academic 
degree payments from other types of training and does not know whether 
degree payments made with credit cards are even captured in its payment 
records.
  What is worse, Mr. Speaker, is the taxpayers have given these fake-
degree

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employees a raise. Now while their managers contend that their 
promotions were based on experience and not education, the GAO does not 
buy it and neither do I.
  Mr. Speaker, developing simple standards for assessing the degrees 
used as credentials by Federal employees in determining which degrees, 
if any, the Federal Government should pay for, these agencies could 
have saved hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
  Mr. Speaker, it is time for the Federal Government to clean up its 
act. It is time to hold Federal employees accountable for its actions. 
And by eliminating this type of waste, fraud and abuse government-wide, 
we can save the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, our measurement of success here in Washington 
should never be how much we spend, but simply how well we spend 
taxpayer dollars.

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