Dive Brief:
- A father and son based in suburban Illinois are charged with education fraud, mail fraud, and federal program bribery after collecting over $33 million in federal education grants for their substandard and misrepresented tutoring services.
- Brilliance Academy Inc. and its subsidiary, Babbage Net School Inc., promised to provide a high-quality tutoring program for low-income students across the country. In reality, they provided inadequate educational resources, sent highly inflated invoices to school districts, and generated made-up student progress and evaluation reports.
- The duo also allegedly paid school district officials bribes in return for recruiting students and diverting federal funds to their companies. Four school officials in Texas and New Mexico have also been charged with federal program bribery.
Dive Insight:
Yikes! Brilliance Academy Inc. and it subsidiary Babbage Net School Inc. are a frightening reality of what can happen when public money goes to deregulated private business and entrepreneur ventures.
No Child Left Behind--which allocated a large chunk of federal money for after-school tutoring--opened the floodgates for 'entrepreneurial programs' like Brilliance Academy, Inc. Millions were ready to be spent on these support services, it was just a matter of who was providing it.
It's clear this suburban pair saw not only an investment opportunity but quick cashflow.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago the director of Brilliance, Jowhar Soultanali, and his son the President of Brilliance, Kabir Kassam, made personal profits of somewhere between $8 million - $13.6 million. The money came from over 200 districts nationally between the 2008-2012 school year.
