Reply to WaPo takes deep dive into DCPS residency fraud

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's how ridiculous some of this fraud investigation is:

40 year DC resident here. Have commuted to other cities, but always lived in DC as an adult. Enrolled kid in Ellington last year with DC license and registration. Get a call 4 months later saying it's my license but wife's registration, even though same household. They could have caught that at the school when I registered but not problem. But OSSE auditors did not ask for matching, they asked for utility bills from certain months. No problem. Sent those. Get a call a month later saying the bills say "credit". They need something saying "paid". I tell them credit means paid, but apparently logic has no impact.  Dig into emails and find a receipts that says "Paid".  Fine, right?  Call a month later says "paid" is one month after the bill. I say "That's how it works. You pay AFTER you get the bill."  Again, logic does not work.  Am asked to go online and print out a ledger of consecutive months. Did that.  Get a call days later saying this is all likely a result of my phone number and wife's and the fact that we have cellphones with out of town area codes, and not landlines with "202".  Except it's the 21st century, and we have not had landlines since 2006, and the whole notion of "mobile" means your number goes with you and area codes are an obsolete concept.   
After the 8th call asking for more, start asking other parents and find out dozens are going through the same thing. Some because the fonts were different on a bill one month than it was on another month, even though DC Water and Pepco both had design and website changes in 2017.

This is all true. I really don't mind being a bit inconvenienced to catch some scofflaws, but when it gets beyond 2-3 calls, we're not talking fraud, we're talking OSSE incompetence.[/quote]  It is actually Ellington Registrar incompetence.  The requirement for evidence of residency is license and registration in the same name that matches the name of the forms you are providing.   Ellington should have stopped you last year when you enrolled and said - I am sorry these do not match.   I have gone through this at other schools and needed to fix it.   After Ellington did a 
poor job not following the standards, it went to OSSE to clean up.

[/quote]

Yeah, but that only explains the first mistake. Could it have ended there? Absolutely. The rest is equally ridiculous.
[/quote]

We go through the first stage of this every year - my husband and I have different last names (I didn't change mine) and the car I tend to drive the most is registered in his name and the car I he tends to drive the most is registered in his name.  We know this, so for re-enrolling every year we have to remember to switch cars when we bring the rest of the documentation.  We got a new to us car last fall and I think it's going to solve our problem (in DH's name, and he drives it).  So I leave the re-enrolling to him.  But the point is our registrar caught it when we started at the school, pointed out the issue, and we make sure we get it right every year.  [/quote]

You should put both of your names on the car registration. That's what we do and re-enrollment is a breeze.[/quote]

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