Fake special ed vendors stole $1.5 million from city, probe finds

Two men used shell companies and forged signatures to charge the Department of Education for sign language services that students didn’t need, an investigation found. The fraud ran for more than two school years and cost the city at least $1.5 million.

The brazen scheme involved claiming payment for services to students who were not enrolled in city schools and, in some cases, offered as proof that services had been provided the forged signatures of people who were retired or even deceased. In one instance, the city paid more than $100,000 over an eight-month period for a student who had left the school system a decade earlier. In another, the city handed out $187,200 in payments that were authorized by someone who had died “several years ago.”

Today, authorities arrested one of the men involved, Nelson Ruiz, while his collaborator, William Cruz, remains at large, said a spokeswoman for the Special Commissioner of Investigation, which conducted the probe.

Special education costs have skyrocketed in recent years and though the sign language fraud doesn’t begin to explain the amount of money that pays for special education servies, it suggests that the ways outside providers  are paid is highly-vulnerable to fraud.

Last summer, the education department created a unit specifically to root out fraud in special education spending and officials said today that it was the work of this unit that eventually prompted the investigation.

Investigators opened the case in February after a department official questioned the authenticity of billing documents that had been submitted by a sign language company called Bilingual Words in Motion.

Eventually, investigators found that a total of five companies, all owned by either Ruiz or Cruz, were swindling the department of payments for sign language services. The companies used the names of 10 students and listed them on forged disability forms to secure payments for services that not only weren’t being provided, but weren’t even needed by the students.

The fraud was apparently able to take place because of shortcomings in the office of Non-Public Schools Payables, which pays independent vendors to provide services to students with disabilities that the department can’t otherwise offer.

Before it authorizes payments, the office first reviews a document — called a ‘related service authorization form — that gives permission to parents to obtain services from an approved independent vendor. These forms included signatures from both parents and education department employees, which Ruiz and Cruz were forging.

Investigators found many of these forms were also outdated, contained wrong addresses, and were issued out of the wrong school district. But when office employees reviewed them, they didn’t pick up on the discrepancies. And  the office also doesn’t have access to a student’s individualized education plan, so they were unable to verify if the student should have been receiving the outside services.

If they had been able to, they would have found some stark discrepancies. Of the ten students detailed in the investigation, most of them didn’t need sign language instruction from an outside vendor. Some didn’t have hearing disabilities at all and three of them were no longer part of the city school system.

Cruz and Ruiz were paid a total of $1,524,160 during the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years, and while the scope of the investigation only went back to 2010, the pair’s theft could have been closer to $4 million. The investigators’ report says that some of the same companies were paid an additional $2.3 million by the Department of Education prior to the 2010-2011 school year.

Ruiz and Cruz technically owned all five of the companies between them, but when investigators began checking up on the companies, there was little evidence that any business was being conducted. None of the companies had offices and their addresses usually linked back to standalone mailboxes. An address for one of the companies, Related Services Solutions, matched Ruiz’s residence in Pennsylvania.

Investigators also looked into the companies’ bank records and found none of them did any business outside of the combined $1.5 million that the city was paying to them.

City officials downplayed the findings from the investigation and said that the education department had already put in place controls to improve how vendors are vetted and how its invoice system is monitors. In a statement, Chancellor Dennis Walcott lauded education department employees who worked to uncover the fraud.

“I want to thank the employees who have been working so diligently over the last year to root out fraud and ensure our neediest students get the services they deserve,” Walcott said. “We will not  allow corrupt businesses to defraud our system and prey on our children.”

The investigation is ongoing and there are still many unanswered questions about how Ruiz and Cruz could had carried out their fraud.

For instance, Cruz apparently used an alias — Bill Chacon — to serve as a special education advocate in impartial hearings. Cruz attended hearings for five of the students who are listed in the report, but it’s unclear how they found the students to claim payments for. It’s even  some of those students did not have any disability. Principals of some of the students who had hearing disabilities told investigators that their services were provided in the school.

The investigation has been handed over to Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

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