The U.S. Education Department's Federal Student Aid office has done too little to carry out regulatory changes adopted five years ago to crack down on colleges' use of incentive compensation to reward employees, the department's inspector general said in a highly critical audit this week.
The Obama administration issued rules on incentive compensation in 2010 as part of a broader package of "program integrity" regulations aimed at limiting fraud and abuse in federal financial aid programs. The incentive compensation rules, which were motivated in part by a pair of Government Accountability Office reports, were designed to undo changes made in 2002 that gave institutions a dozen "safe harbors" that allowed recruiters to be paid without violating the federal law banning incentive compensation.
The 2010 regulatory changes, the inspector general's office said in the audit dated Tuesday, gave the department "an excellent opportunity to revise its enforcement policies and practices" regarding incentive compensation.
But the department has by and large not seized on that opportunity, the audit asserts.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/27/audit-education-dept-hasnt-enforced-incentive-compensation-rules-well