Inspecting the Inspector General: Should Auditors Set the Terms of Debate on Federal Education Policy?

An independent watchdog agency, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), from the U.S. Department of Education, is charged with ferreting out waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars in both K-12 and postsecondary education. OIG's official mission is to "promote the efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity of the [Education] Department's programs and operations." It primarily fulfills that mission as an investigative body and completes about 25 audits and 250-300 investigations each year. OIG works to make government agencies more accountable while protecting taxpayer dollars from improprieties and fraud--exactly the trust-restoring role that lawmakers had in mind when they created the inspectors general. This paper describes the 2017 OIG audit and report on Western Governors University (WGU) as a case study of how OIG can stubbornly reject innovation and flexibility to guard against fraud. It also discusses how, compared to postsecondary education, K-12 systems and policies garner less attention from OIG, particularly with respect to policy recommendations. Overall, the paper recommends that policymakers who are directly accountable to taxpayers must take a broad range of interests into consideration--a holistic view in which OIG's perspective is one of several, and its interest in preventing fraud is one of many public goods.