Los Angeles Film School has made thousands of false jobs for graduates, say the former leaders in a trial
Two former leaders of the Los Angeles Film School have filed a denunciator trial accusing the school of creating thousands of false jobs for its graduates in order to maintain its eligibility for federal funding.
The trial, obtained Tuesday by Thewrap, was filed in June 2024 and not sealed last May after the United States Ministry of Justice refused to get involved. In this document, the former vice-president of admissions Ben Chaib and the former vice-president of career advancement Dave Phillips accuse the LAF of large quantities of fraud to maintain their accreditation and hide evidence of this fraud of a 2017 audit by the United States Ministry of Education.
To qualify for federal aid to students, higher education establishments must prove that at least 70% of its graduates are able to find work in their chosen field. According to the trial, Lafs receives $ 85 million in federal annual financial aid, including $ 60 million in student loan funds.
The trial says that Phillips, as well as other Lafs leaders, have been informed by the owner James “Bill” Heavener just before the 2017 audit that full -time jobs for graduates of the school registration program “do not exist” and that if the listeners have discovered this “around a third of our business will disappear”.
As part of the alleged scam, Phillips and Chaib allege that the CEO of Heavener and Lafs, Diana Dercyz-Kessler, asked school officials “to focus strictly on the appearance of compliance” with the 70%reference index. To this end, they financed independent productions with the plan to use them to hire Laf graduates for jobs that only lasted a few days, just long enough so that they can claim that their graduates had found a paid job.
The trial also accuses theFS of paying $ 1 million from 2010 to 2017 to various companies to hire graduates for two days, controlling how paid graduates would be. The applicants said that theFS hid these payments to the Ministry of Education during the 2017 audit as well as an incentive payment program for the school sales team illegally linked to students registration.
Lafs did not respond to the requests for the comments of Thewrap, but in a declaration filed before the American district court of Los Angeles, the lawyers of the school denied complaints, accusing the complainants of trying to “reanalyze the Ministry of Education and erroneous allegations, which have already been investigated and resolved by the Ministry of Education” in the context of an investigation which took place in 2017 for 2020.
In the press release, Lafs also claims that Chaib and Phillips submitted their complaints against the school within the framework of the colonies affected respectively in 2021 and 2023 at their school departures. The FAs accused the complainants of depositing the pursuit of the reporters “to extract additional money” thanks to research costs that the government can pay to all individuals who signal fraud linked to federal funds.
