What Went Wrong
May 26, 2011 in GAO Report
After the GAO severely botched its attempt at an undercover investigation of career colleges, the agency was forced to rewrite its official report, revamp its investigative department, and remove the guy in charge.
How did things go so wrong? An internal GAO memo discovered by the Daily Caller gives us an inside look at some serious problems.
First, the memo repeatedly blames “short time frames.” The phrase is used four times in six paragraphs. They really felt the need to hammer that point home. The memo also notes that work had to be done “at the last minute,” that “timeframes are not flexible,” the need to “extend our job timelines,” and a recommendation for “adding additional time to a job.”
And that’s just the beginning.
According to the memo, the investigative team got bullied into altering the report at the last minute by outside forces. “The team’s unwillingness to say no to additional insertion of details at the end of a job created several of our most obvious inaccuracies,” it says.
Who are these outside forces? Unnamed “stakeholders” and “Congressional staffers.”
Let’s make that crystal clear: Congressional staffers got an early look at the report and demanded changes that made career colleges look worse.
How do we know the changes made career colleges look worse? Because every single inaccuracy in the report make career colleges look worse. If Congressional staffers are responsible for the most obvious inaccuracies in the report, then it’s pretty clear what their agenda was. They weren’t trying to find the truth. They were on a witch hunt.
This wasn’t just a rush job – it was a hatchet job.
I guess the folks in Washington don’t have anything better to do than … misinterpret the videotaped visits? Guess the don’t read the newspapers or watch the news, otherwise they might be distracted by all of the real problems they should be dealing with right now in our country.
As a person that works at a for-profit institution it is disheartening and disappointing to see a report like this. It is even more bothersome that there will be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students that will be impacted by the rules and regulations implemented by heavily skewed information.
I believe tax dollars would be better spent investigating Sen. Harkin, his staffers, these hearings, and the GAO. That’s where the corruption seems to be.