I don't think you even need to go that far -- the problem seems to be on the side of the verification of financial aid being too lenient, right? How is that vetting breaking down? The typical financial aid forms and process is a pain in the neck. Money people usually require all sorts of documentation before they actually send you money.
Increasing the amount of documentation disproportionately hurts real students (or real social welfare claimants, etc). The scammers can figure out getting the fake documentation once and then scale the process - that's literally their business.
To deter scammers without the real applicants paying for it, you need quality, not quantity: proof of identity that is harder to fake.
You could hire a company or staff a team that meets people where they are to do ID verification in person. This is essentially how buying a house works with title companies. You can go to the title company or they can come to you for a fee.
people who are most familiar with what exactly is needed to pass, are the administrators themselves. This is a corruption problem coupled with automation. source: california resident
no doubt the readers here are very clever, but also sometimes lazy in their questions.
Take a look at how real financial crime is done.. the ones that know what they are doing, not the amateurs. Obviously the first item in a plan is "what is the cost of being caught" and quickly, "how can I get this to happen without doing it myself and getting caught" .. so it is a cooperative agreement, to be corrupt. The most successful of the corrupt never do any illegal things at all, they simply look the other way. Next is finding someone desperate, or far away, to "do the crime" but the successful person is involved somehow, in the most distant way possible.
Do I really have to type this out? I am guessing anyway. Did I say "the admins are making fraud things at night?" no. They mostly do not, but that does not make them not involved. Read what I wrote, that is what I meant to say here.
I like to see if people are willing to be explicit with silly claims, instead of hovering at plausibly deniable vagueness. I agree that you were intending to say something plausibly deniably vague, as you did.
Probably. But I suspect for the average person community college is trying to help, more documentation is more onerous and actually harder to get right. Instead an in person verification would be less costly for them to engage in and more understandable.
