BALTIMORE (WBFF) — A bombshell report confirms millions of tax dollars are being misallocated statewide to educate students who aren’t even in school.
 

An audit by the Inspector General for Education found many Maryland schools have been miscalculating attendance and enrollment, costing taxpayers at least $23 million.
 

This audit follows a FOX45 investigation into so-called ghost students. Ghost students are kept on the rolls to increase the amount of funding a school receives. According to this new IG report, it’s an issue that’s been costing taxpayers millions across the state for years.
 

“Taxpayers in Maryland were cheated, and the fraud needs to stop,” said Sean Kennedy with The Maryland Public Policy Institute.
 

In April 2021, The Maryland Public Policy Institute sent a request to Maryland’s Inspector General for Education asking the office to investigate enrollment discrepancies.
 

“It’s a big deal that we are catching them spending money that they should not have had,” Kennedy told Project Baltimore.
 

The request followed a series of Project Baltimore reports into ghost students. In 2021, Fox45 News learned of 21 potential ghost students enrolled at Augusta Fells in West Baltimore, including a student who was enrolled while in jail.
 

“I didn't enroll in the classes or anything. I've been gone since 2017, buddy,” the former Augusta Fells student told Project Baltimore.
 

An internal investigation by city schools confirmed the problem was worse than FOX45 had initially reported, finding approximately 100 students with questionable enrollment status at just this one school. Now, we know the problem is even bigger.
 

“This is nothing less than theft. They're stealing money from the taxpayers of Maryland in order to line their pockets or to spend money on other programs when the money was not designated for that,” Kennedy said.
 

The IG’s audit, released on April 20, looked at enrollment counts over the last five years and found 928 instances of students in Baltimore City who did not meet attendance or enrollment requirements under Maryland law. The audit found 532 City students who didn’t have any recorded attendance during the year.
 

Those students should not have been eligible for funding, but City Schools received nearly $10 million in taxpayer dollars to educate those students, who were not there.
 

In the same five-year period, the IG found nearly 3,000 instances of students statewide who should not have received funding. That includes 995 students who had no documented attendance at any point during the year. That adds up to nearly $24 million in misallocated tax dollars.
 

The report blames these errors on poor attendance keeping and staff not withdrawing chronically absent students. However, it also says over 92 percent of the discrepancies were discovered and self-reported to the Maryland State Department of Education which “did not identify or act on these discrepancies during the reporting process”
 

“The inspector general found out this is the tip of the iceberg,” Kennedy told Project Baltimore.
 

The report says there are “more discrepancies” statewide concerning students who are funded and should not be. This means the problem is bigger than nearly $24 million over five years but there is no word on how much bigger. To fix the problem, however large, the audit offers nine total recommendations between City Schools and MSDE to help ensure a more accurate enrollment count. North Avenue and MSDE have agreed to implement most of them.
 

“It's unclear if it was intentional as an outright fraud or this was just sloppy bookkeeping that happened to benefit them,” Kennedy said. “There was no interest in providing oversight when that oversight would have cost that money. So, they let egregious bookkeeping go on because it always came out in their favor.”
 

Project Baltimore will be staying on this story, but it’s important to note that this audit only focused on students who should not have been eligible to receive funding. We found more than 6,000 students statewide, in 2019, labeled whereabouts unknown. Even though those students went missing throughout the year, the IG said, most of them were still eligible to receive funding under Maryland law, costing taxpayers millions of dollars.