World-class surveillance operatives
When a school board wanted to develop a program to combat residency fraud they came to Dinolt Becnel & Wells Investigative Group to do the investigations. Residency fraud is when parents enroll their children in schools where they do not reside. It is a serious problem, as it bleeds resources from cash-strapped municipalities, who are forced to shoulder the substantial cost of educating students from families who do not pay taxes in their jurisdictions.
Our firm was instrumental in creating an anti-residency fraud program in this school jurisdiction, where no such comprehensive program had existed before. One of the main challenges we faced was how to “prove” parents were living in a certain location, particularly if tax, motor vehicle, and property records were inconsistent. We quickly determined that the only way we could prove the fraud was to observe students at homes outside of their schools’ jurisdiction.
The evidence we gleaned from our investigations was essentially irrefutable, which significantly helped the school board confront the guilty parents and to set an example to stem the problem of residency fraud.
For an entire school year, our private investigators received countless tips from an anonymous hotline (among other sources), did intensive research on parents’ residences to investigate the complaints—and we conducted daily surveillance on the subjects of these tips to see where they came from before school. Because the subjects of these investigations were children, our investigations had to be handled with the utmost delicacy.
Because of the top-notch work our investigators did, we were able to identify scores of parents who were brazenly ripping off the school system. Our reports contained photographs of students and their parents leaving homes in outside jurisdictions and commuting into the schools. The evidence we gleaned from our investigations was essentially irrefutable, which significantly helped the school board confront the guilty parents and to set an example to stem the problem of residency fraud.