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Tuition money spent on massage, music classes

Instead of using tuition assistance to pay for courses related to their Air Force careers, hundreds of airmen and Air Force civilians used the grants to pay for classes in such subjects as real estate, music appreciation and massage therapy.

The bill for classes unrelated to Air Force careers came to about $25 million in 2005, according to an Air Force Audit Agency investigation into how tuition money is spent. That’s about 17 percent of the service’s tuition assistance budget.

The same investigation found that education offices were lax in getting airmen to pay back the Air Force if they failed courses, and that they often didn’t update officer personnel records to show officers had extended their active-duty service commitments in exchange for free tuition.

Potential fixes to the tuition abuses won’t be in place until May at the earliest, the report said.

Air Force Times obtained the audit through a Freedom of Information Act request. The 2007 investigation focused on tuition assistance in 2005.

The tuition program is overseen by the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel and Manpower at the Pentagon. Officials familiar with the program and audit were not available to comment to Air Force Times, a service spokesman said.

Among the questionable tuition grants cited in the probe were:

* $4,272 for an engine specialist at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., to earn a real estate license.

* $518 for a civilian test monitor at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., to study marriage counseling.

* $1,404 for an F-16 maintainer at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., to attend massage therapy classes.

The report didn’t accuse the airmen and civilians of theft or fraud. Instead, the report faulted the instructions provided by base-level education services offices about what classes qualify for tuition payments.

The investigation found that Air Force instructions for airmen’s education programs, written in 2002, and civilian employee development, issued in 2002, didn’t keep up with changes to tuition assistance priorities.

In 2004, the “force development program” called for airmen to use tuition aid to pay for classes that improved their occupational and leadership skills. However, the 2000 Air Force instruction said the payments could be used for “developmental courses that support the AF mission and individual professional development” — wording vague enough that it could be interpreted to include real estate and massage lessons.

In written comments to auditors, the Air Force personnel office agreed that changes should be made to tuition assistance rules, but those revisions are still being developed.

An airman who fails a course is supposed to pay back the tuition grant to the Air Force. But in more than 350 cases, auditors found education offices took from three months to more than a year to begin recouping the money. And at two bases, Osan Air Base, South Korea, and Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, no money was collected from 68 airmen who owed a total of $26,599.

Officers who receive tuition assistance for graduate school classes typically agree to extend their time in the Air Force by two years.

The auditors examined the records of 1,130 officers who had received tuition assistance and discovered that 38 percent didn’t have extended active-duty service commitments noted in their electronic personnel records. Because of that failure, 11 officers were allowed to separate voluntarily up to 23 months before they should have left.

The Audit Agency again faulted Air Force instructions for not being specific; it did not fault the officers. After receiving the audit results, the Air Force personnel office agreed to improve how it tracks which students fail classes and its record keeping for officer service commitments.