US News

Test-aid firm ‘cheat’ shock

A major tutoring company failed the honesty test, authorities charged yesterday.

The feds slapped The Princeton Review with a civil suit that accuses the test-prep giant of scamming millions of dollars through a taxpayer-funded after-school program for needy kids.

Court papers say company workers routinely falsified documents to fraudulently boost attendance at its Supplemental Educational Services tutoring classes at “underperforming” schools.

Under the program, The Princeton Review was paid between $35 and $75 an hour for each student under terms of the No Child Left Behind Act, the suit says.

But between 2006 and 2010, “most, if not all, of the monthly invoices” allegedly contained false information, and TPR billed the city Department of Education for “thousands of hours of tutoring services that Princeton Review never actually provided.”

According to the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office, evidence in the case includes “obvious” forgeries of student signatures, including several where they “change in appearance from class to class,” and another in which a child’s name was misspelled “Donate” instead of Dontae.

A spokeswoman for The Princeton Review said: “The activity allegedly occurred within the company’s former Supplemental Educational Services division, which the company discontinued in 2010.

“No former SES employees or executives are with the company today, and current management — most of whom joined the company after the division was shuttered — had no involvement or role in the affairs of SES.”