Education grant problems are a warning for Idaho: Vouchers ripe for fraud, abuse | Opinion

The Empowering Parents grant program has run into some choppy water.

The program was created during the pandemic, using $50 million in federal COVID relief funds to create small grants for families to purchase educational supplies. But it’s becoming apparent that the program — essentially a voucher system for education supplies — has had a very high rate of improper payments.

It’s yet another clear demonstration that proposed “school choice initiatives” — a political codeword for voucher programs — should be a non-starter.

As Idaho Education News reported, Gov. Brad Little has called for a full audit by the Division of Financial Management of grants issued under the Empowering Parents grant program on June 9. After an existing review by the State Board of Education had examined 70% of purchases, about 7% were determined to be unlawful, and another 13% are in question. The improper purchases included “TV sets, smart watches, clothing and household cleaning supplies,” according to Ed News.

So it seems between 7% and 20% of the money paid out came from improper payments. Improper payments are what is meant when people harp about “waste, fraud and abuse” in welfare and other government programs.

How bad is an improper payment rate of 7% to 20%?

It’s not great. For context, compare that to federal poverty relief programs. For example, in 2021, there were headlines about a distressing rise in the rate of improper payments in the SNAP (often called “food stamps”) program. The perceived crisis was caused by reports indicating the rate was approaching 1%.

The figure is higher with programs like Medicare, around 6%. The figures for Medicaid are currently skewed by the pandemic — a federal law disallowed disenrolling people from Medicaid as an emergency measure — but pre-pandemic, it had an improper payment rate of around 10%.

Not all improper payments, either with the federal program or with Empower Parents, are fraud. For federal programs, it often simply means the right proof of income paperwork isn’t in place, for example.

And with Empowering Parents, it’s easy to see how many parents may have been confused about what they could buy.

For example, computers are approved expenses, but computer components — say, some additional memory to upgrade an existing computer — aren’t approved expenses. Tablets are approved expenses, but smartphones aren’t. Laptop stands are approved expenses, but laptop cases are not.

So a good bet is that a lot of this isn’t intentional fraud but confusion about what is and what isn’t a legitimate expense. But this much is also true: This is not a problem in Idaho’s public schools, where rigorous procurement laws head off problems like these.

Consider what it would mean to massively expand the Empowering Parents grant program so that it could cover private school tuition for students across the state.

The same kinds of well-meaning errors could happen under a school voucher system but with a whole lot more taxpayer dollars at stake. And there could be kickback schemes, as well: Efforts to set up fake or bare-bones schools so that the school organizers could cash in as many vouchers as possible.

This has indeed been the pattern in states that have adopted voucher systems, as we pointed out previously. In both Arizona and Arkansas, pervasive recipient abuse was found, with people using vouchers to buy TVs, beauty supplies and numerous other things that have nothing to do with education. And there have been reports of embezzlement of vouchers by those leading schools that receive lots of taxpayer dollars.

The Empowering Parents grant system has its virtues. It was an innovative way to use COVID-19 funds, and it has probably done a lot of good. It’s not at all clear that the program should be ended, rather than simply shored up and reformed.

The Idaho State Board of Education was briefed about the issue at its meeting Wednesday in Pocatello, according to a news release, and it plans to follow up. And Little has asked for the entire program to have a detailed audit.

The right things are being done, and we should wait for the findings of that audit before coming to a final judgment on the Empowering Parents program.

But what this incident also makes clear is that these grant programs should stay within their current bounds, and not be expanded to include private school tuition. Taxpayers have a role to play in covering educational supplies for children, especially children with few means. But taxpayer dollars should never be diverted to private schools, where accountability vanishes and opportunities for fraud and abuse abound.