The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico published the result of the investigation of a complaint related to the billing of services for workshops and training sessions not offered at the Department of Education (DE).
The investigation reveals that a corporation contracted from 2014 to 2015, to offer Saturday workshops and training sessions to teachers of the Work Plan 14-22-Mathematical Learning in the Context of 21st Century Society, presented documents with altered signatures and false information to justify the collection of $60,500 for services not rendered. The documentary and testimonial evidence shows that 39 teachers and facilitators indicated they had not taken the training sessions and 37 did not recall having taken them.
In addition, after verifying the invoices and by means of sworn statement, two trainers indicated that they did not offer the 61 training services of the Mathcloud mathematics project; another two trainers confirmed that they did not offer the 118 training services of the educating mathematicians project, Edumat; four trainers stated that they were unaware that the corporation had used their names to bill 179 training services, and one of them indicated that he did not qualify to be a trainer.
The professor who proposed the project, who certified the corporation's invoices, said that said corporation was selected from the catalog of eligible bidders and designated a person in charge to pre-audit the invoices. However, the professor stated that she did not pre-audit or review the invoices and did not corroborate that the billed services had been offered, except on some occasion when she visited the training sessions.
The person in charge of pre-auditing the invoices told the Comptroller's auditors that her work was voluntary, that she verified the documentation required by the Office of Federal Affairs, that she did not participate in the selection of the corporation, and that she also did not corroborate whether the billed services were offered.
These situations were referred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education, on July 26, 2019.
The Report concludes that the former director of the Program may have incurred in negligence by not verifying and by allowing a person without legal authority to certify the invoices that are the subject of this investigation. In addition, the crimes of aggravated misappropriation, fraud, ideological falsehood, and negligence in the performance of duty, among others, classified in Act 146-2012 of the Penal Code of Puerto Rico, may have been committed.
The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico has published six reports with findings related to the lack of controls in the contracting and billing processes of services rendered to the Department, these are: DA-15-17, DA-15-33, TI-17-14, DA-17-39, TI-18-15, and DA-19-05.
The Result of the Investigation is dated November 30, 2020.
See Audit Report OALIL-I-21-02.
To see other published reports, visit our Audit Reports section.
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