Duplicate Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund Grant Awards

This flash report presents our finding concerning duplicate Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF) grant awards to institutions of higher education.1 This report includes a recommendation to enhance the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) ability to prevent, identify, and correct duplicate HEERF grant awards.We identified 25 duplicate HEERF grant awards that OPE made to 24 schools, totaling about $73 million, which had not been corrected and documented in G5 as of August 2021. OPE officials stated that their processes for reviewing and approving HEERF applications and awards, which evolved over time, resulted in OPE identifying and correcting many duplicate HEERF grant awards. However, we found that OPE’s processes did not always prevent or timely identify and correct duplicate HEERF grant awards, and that OPE did not consistently document activities taken to correct duplicate awards.