Baltimore City schools: Yellow Cab charges could be fraudulent, inspector general says

A Maryland Office of the Inspector General for Education report released on Monday found that Baltimore City Public Schools paid as much as $631,000 over three years to a cab company for rides to school that students may never have taken.

Investigators for the education inspector general’s office compared records from Yellow Cab — which is now known as zTrip, according to the report — with city school attendance records and found that between the 2018-19 school year and the 2021-22 school year, there were 1,115 students and 3,900 instances when the students had not been in school when the taxi company said they were transported there. In addition, the report said the system had overpaid the taxicab company by $86,753 because the rates the company had charged more than the agreed-upon rate.

“The results of our data analysis indicate the BCPS has paid for taxicab services for students not attending school and that Yellow Cab potentially provided fraudulent invoices and vouchers,” the report said. The inspector general has referred the case to the Maryland Office of the Attorney General for further review.

The inspector general’s office also recommended the school system ask for reimbursement from the cab company for the money the report said it shouldn’t have paid.

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Baltimore City Public Schools contracts with taxi services to transport students who are homeless or in special education classes when no other option is available. Students who become homeless are allowed under law to attend their old school rather than have to switch to a new school when their location changes.

The report said Yellow Cab continued to bill the school system for 25 students who withdrew or transferred to another school system. In total, the system paid $9,158 for 317 rides for students who were no longer enrolled.

The inspector general’s report noted that the city schools had begun requiring taxi drivers to provide invoices signed by students and drivers. The report noted that they believed drivers may have been requiring students to sign the invoices for rides long before they were going to take the ride.

The school system did not dispute the inspector general’s report. In a statement, school officials said they “collaborated with the OIGE to get to the bottom of this matter to ensure that taxicab vendors do not violate their obligations to City Schools students. "

The school system uses taxicabs only when absolutely necessary and has reduced cab ridership by 90% since 2018-19, school officials said shortly after the release of the report.

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The majority of problems the inspector general identified occurred in the first two years of the report and decreased significantly after the school system began visually inspecting the signed papers and checking a sampling of attendance records.

The issues the report identified, Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises wrote, involved a single vendor that “potentially provided fraudulent invoices and vouchers” that circumvented the city’s controls.

The cab company did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.

The attorney general’s office confirmed that it received the referral from the inspector general. The office does not comment on whether an investigation is underway.

liz.bowie@thebaltimorebanner.com

Liz Bowie

liz.bowie@thebaltimorebanner.com