What Barbara Bernier found at the for-profit Charlotte School of Law was different from her prior teaching experiences, so she quit her tenured post in August 2016. A few months earlier, she had filed a federal claim that the school and its owner, the InfiLaw Corp., defrauded taxpayers of $285 million over a five-year period, the New York Times reported today. The whistle-blower lawsuit — which had been kept sealed under the federal False Claims Act — came to light in recent weeks, along with the disclosure that it had prompted a federal investigation. The fraud practices alleged in the lawsuit include evading federal requirements that for-profit schools receive at least 10 percent of revenue from sources other than federal student loans. Details of that and other practices, including providing stipends to at-risk students to delay taking the state bar exam, were cited in Bernier’s lawsuit. It was unsealed last month when the United States attorney’s office in Orlando, Fla. — where the lawsuit was filed, in InfiLaw’s state — filed a notice that it would not intervene in the lawsuit.
