In 1990, the General Accounting Office designated the U.S. Department of Education’s student financial-assistance programs – some $50 billion in loans and grants a year – a high-risk area for waste, fraud, abuse and, for good measure, mismanagement. Since then, the watchdog over all federal agencies has given the matter thorough review many times; each time the GAO has found fraud, et al., thriving at Education.

In 1993, Education awarded a $39 million contract to create a unified computer database that would allow it to put all post-secondary institutions on the same page in processing requests for aid. Eight years later, the GAO found in yet another thorough review, the new computer system had yet to be plugged in.

So, in early 2001, Maine Sen. Susan M. Collins, then chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, asked the GAO to investigate one narrow alley of this financial aid labyrinth – loans and grants going to American students attending foreign colleges. The GAO, having learned a painful lesson about the fruitlessness of thorough reviews and no doubt daunted by the prospect of trying to wrest information from foreign colleges, adopted a novel approach.

It made up a foreign college. The Y’Hica Institute for the Visual Arts of London, England, exists only in a brochure concocted by GAO staff. The address, phone numbers, class catalog, administration and faculty were bogus, as were the financial statements (certified by a nonexistent accountant), as were the letters of support from actual education authorities in the United Kingdom.

Of course, you can’t demonstrate fraud, etc., in student financial aid without students, so the GAO made up some of those, too. Three students were concocted, along with all the personal and financial information required by the application process. It is not for nothing that the GAO is known as one of the more droll federal agencies – they named one of these fictitious students Susan M. Collins.

The GAO report on this investigating now has been released and Mainers should be proud to learn that their junior senator was deemed worthy of $18,500 in federal aid to pursue her dream as a watercolorist, or perhaps as a maker of documentary films. The other two imaginary applicants likewise passed Education’s scrutiny.

Americans should be appalled to learn, however, that GAO succeeded in so thoroughly demonstrating, in its first attempt, the inattention and sloppiness with which $50 billion is handled. Not to mention the fact that the name of a U.S. senator- the one in charge of investigations, no less – did not ring a bell with anyone at Education or that no one thought an unusual name like Y’Hica deserved at least a follow-up phone call. Maybe it’s time to plug in that $39 million computer. If, in fact, it actually exists.