Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Procurement Card Fraud at GPC

Frequent readers of this blog will recall that I taught at Georgia Perimeter College (GPC) for nearly six years on and off before I moved down here to Valdosta this fall. I was disheartened although not entirely surprised to learn of the fraud in the use of Procurement Cards ("P Cards") at GPC. Two investigative reports and one opinion piece appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this past week. Here are my PDF versions of these pieces:

Buying Binge, by Andrea Jones (Oct. 5, 2007)

Perdue Cracks Down on Cards, by Andrea Jones (Oct. 5, 2007)

Audit: Abuse of Credit Brazen, by Maureen Downey (Oct. 8, 2007)

Most of the fraud appears to have involved employees at the Clarkston and Decatur campuses, and I taught primarily at the Lawrenceville campus over in Gwinnett County. P Card fraud has been committed by employees of Georgia Tech as well.

Nonetheless, this shows something I have often remarked. We in higher education are sometimes our own worst enemies. It seems that we all cut corners or juggle our budgets and work assignments for our own personal gain and that of our close friends and colleagues. The community colleges and lower tier schools do see some of the worst of it. That is unfortunate because that is where the needs are the greatest. Several dedicated faculty members could have been moved from part-time to full-time status with the money that was wasted on personal gifts, vacations, car payments and other fraudulent purchases.

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2 Comments:

At 7:17 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

This is just really sad!!

:-(

 
At 9:06 PM , Blogger Don Thieme said...

I know. Thank you so much for reading, though! It is good that these folks were caught, I think. It may become an example of the wasteful use of taxpayer money in education, however.

 

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