ERate Fraud?

[wl-mw at msln.net]

>From Al Tompkins' Morning Meeting - a daily email of story ideas for 
journalists (http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=16508)


You Paid $2 Billion for it on Your Phone Bill -- 

Bob Williams, an Al's Morning Meeting reader and investigative reporter
for the Center for Public Integrity, sent me a link to his strong new
story
<http://www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=492&L1=10&L2=
10&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0> , which you should pay attention to. 

He investigated the federal government's E-Rate program.
<http://www.ed.gov/Technology/comm-mit.html>  This is
money collected
from everybody who has a phone. Look on your bill and you will see that
you pay a "universal service fee" or some other similar mysterious
item.
Even the Federal Communication Commission's Inspector General says the
E-Rate fund is pretty much out of control. (The full report is available
at the FCC's website. <http://www.fcc.gov/oig/sar902.pdf> )

The Center for Public Integrity's story says, "A $2.25 billion federal
program that helps schools and libraries connect to the Internet is
honeycombed with fraud and financial shenanigans, but the government
officials in charge say they don't have the resources to fix it."

Bob tells Al's Morning Meeting, "About $2.25 billion of that money is
supposed to go to hook up schools and libraries to the Internet each
year. But the report shows much of that money is apparently going to
line the pockets of telecommunications and technology companies."

The Center for Public Integrity story includes a link
<http://www.sl.universalservice.org/funding/>  that will
help you
localize this story. The link allows you to zero in on what schools in
your area are getting money from the fund.

  _____  

sent on by Molly Wms.