A settlement has been reached in a whistleblower class action lawsuit brought against Education Affiliates who is accused of submitting false claims to the Department of Education for federal student aid for students enrolled in its programs.
Five whistleblowers will receive payments totaling approximately $1.8 million.
A series of whistleblower lawsuits was filed, the first of which was in 2010. The government alleged on behalf of these whistleblowers, that employees at Education Affiliates’s All State Career campus in Baltimore altered admissions test results so as to admit unqualified students, created false or fraudulent high school diplomas and falsified students’ federal aid applications, and that multiple Education Affiliates schools referred prospective students to “diploma mills” to obtain invalid online high school diplomas. These allegations also led to criminal convictions of two All State Careers admission representatives, Barry Sugarman and Jesse Moore, and a test proctor, Jacqueline Caldwell.
