A Somali man who ran a scam tutoring company for needy Franklin County students was sentenced to 13 months in prison Thursday on federal charges of falsifying invoices and stealing students’ identities.
Ashkir Ali, 46, of Balsam Lake Drive on the East Side, pleaded guilty in November to the charges. He faced as many as seven years in prison.
“I’m not coming back here,” Ali told U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
Sargus ordered Ali to pay $115,916 in restitution and to serve 13 months in a federal prison and five months in a half-way house. He said a m andatory two-year prison sentence for identity theft was reduced because of Ali’s “substantial assistance” in investigating tutoring fraud.
Ali was indicted more than a year ago after a two-year investigation of his company, WAISS Network Technologies, by the Ohio auditor’s office.
The probe revealed that WAISS made $100,000 from Columbus and $20,000 from South-Western city schools as part of the federal “supplemental educational services” tutoring program, mandated by the No Child Left Behind law.
The program, which had little oversight from the state and schools, was shut down after the 2011-12 school year.
The indictment against Ali said his company charged Columbus schools $55 to $65 an hour for tutoring between September 2007 and January 2012.
Jim Longerbone, who investigated the case when he worked for the auditor’s office, said in November that Ali billed Columbus for students he never tutored or tutored infrequently. None of the South-Western students Ali claimed he tutored received tutoring, Longerbone said.
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