$20,000 Scuba Lessons: The Dive Shops’ Scholarship Scam

Georgia dive shops billed VA up to $20,000 per veteran for scuba courses and invented “scholarship” students to fake the VA’s 85/15 enrollment rule. Over $6M. All six pleaded guilty.

Meers, a school certifying official and course director at Scooba Shack in Savannah and Richmond Hill and later a consultant and instructor at Diver’s Den in St. Marys, prepared VA approval applications and course catalogs he knew contained false information.

The defendants caused false submissions to the VA misstating regulatory compliance, student attendance dates and instruction hours. They also created fictitious scholarship programs to make it appear a required percentage of students were not VA-funded — masking violations of the VA’s 85/15 enrollment-ratio rule, the safeguard meant to prove a school has real civilian demand.

The shops billed the VA up to more than $20,000 per veteran enrollee. VA OIG and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service investigated.

"circumvented the rules designed to protect that funding, purely for their personal enrichment"
— U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia

Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia. Case file in the VA Fraud case files — part of the VA Fraud record. Cases are published as the courts decided them; amounts are stated as the Justice Department states them (billed, stolen, or ordered in restitution, as labeled).