A small university in Georgia has agreed to pay back $500,000 of a multi-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for failing to accurately document some expenditures associated with the grant program. The NSF alleged that administrators at Fort Valley State University (FVSU), one of Georgia's historically black universities located about 100 miles south of Atlanta, violated the False Claims Act, legislation usually invoked to punish Medicare fraudsters or war profiteers. The NSF claimed that FVSU administrators failed to adequately certify several expenditures in a way that violated the terms of a $2.5 million "Strengthening Undergraduate Preparation in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology" grant over the course of six years from 2001-1007.
"As far as we can tell, there was no real criminal activity involved in this, but there was clearly some lack of controls in record keeping," said John Millsaps, spokesperson for the board of regents of the...



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