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A House committee is seeking answers after an independent auditor found “material weaknesses” in the Education Department’s financial statements for the second consecutive year.
North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the Republican who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, said in a letter sent Thursday to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that the committee will hold a hearing about the audit next month.
“Simply put, the Department has failed an audit two years in a row, been derelict in its duties, and continues to make up estimates it cannot defend to its auditor,” Foxx wrote along with Representative Lloyd Smucker, a Pennsylvania Republican. “We are deeply disturbed by this administration’s bungling, general ineptness, and deliberate wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars. The American people deserve better.”
KPMG, the independent auditor hired by the department’s inspector general, cited errors in the student loan data used to determine the cost of providing the loans. As a result, KPMG said it didn’t have enough evidence to issue an opinion on the department’s financial statements.
The same auditor dinged the department last year for not being able to provide evidence supporting its estimate of how much President Biden’s broad-based student loan forgiveness plan would cost.
The department wrote in its annual financial report that it would address the issues KPMG found.
