School district fakes records for immigrant teachers

For years, even after being advised by a state agency to stop, a major school district in Texas dodged administrative hassles by hiring foreign nationals as teachers and issuing them fake Social Security numbers.

The Dallas Independent School District, according to the Dallas Morning News, has been hiring Mexican and Spanish citizens for years to deal with a shortage in bilingual teachers.

The school district's Office of Professional Responsibility began an investigation, however, after it received a tip in July that many of the foreign teachers were being issued false Social Security numbers in order to push through bureaucratic red tape and get them on the payroll more quickly.

The Dallas Observer found 192 instances of Social Security discrepancies in the office's investigative report, with 26 caused by phony numbers given to foreign nationals.

The district's human resources chief, Kim Olson, assumed her post last year. She told the Dallas paper that she learned of the practice this summer – about the same time the investigation began – and immediately put an end to it.

"There's no way we should be doing that kind of stuff," Olson said. "Even if your intention is good to help employees get paid, you can't use inappropriate procedures to do that."

She told the Morning News, "You can't just arbitrarily issue Social Security numbers. ... It's not legal."

According to the office's investigative report, obtained by Dallas newspapers, the false numbers were supposed to be a stopgap measure until the employees received their real numbers from the Social Security Administration.

The report found no instances of the false numbers being provided to the IRS or federal authorities, but it did discover cases where the state's educator certification office assumed the numbers to be legitimate and used them to run criminal background checks on the teachers.

The report also revealed that the practice had been going on for years, despite being caught by state officials, and that many more cases had been confirmed.

In 2004, the Texas Education Agency received a fax from the Dallas district that included about 100 new Social Security Administration cards for foreign citizens, asking the TEA to replace the old, district-issued numbers with the proper numbers.

At the time, the report says, the state office informed the Dallas district that it's illegal to make up Social Security numbers, even temporarily, and advised the district to stop the practice.

The district, however, continued issuing the bogus numbers. The Morning News reports interviewing officials who couldn't say just how long the practice had been in place or how many numbers had been issued.

The TEA's director of investigations, Doug Phillips, told the paper that teacher applicants who don't have a Social Security number can receive a proper temporary identification number, which begins with a "P," from the TEA until they get one from the federal government.

The report revealed, however, that rather than obtaining the "P" numbers, the Dallas school district had issued numbers beginning with "200," meaning many of the false numbers may have matched actual Social Security numbers of citizens in Pennsylvania.