Public Sector​

Public Sector Projects Include:

• Monitored federal grant monies in 23 states for compliance with the No Child Left Behind,  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,  federal OMB Omni Circular, and more. Read More
• Monitored federal grant monies distributed to schools in one of the nation's largest school districts.
• ​Monitored services for approximately 22,000 children with disabilities younger than age 3. Read More
• ​Developed a grant management system and grant monitoring program for a state agency overseeing grants that serve employees of the horse racing industry and their families​.
• Developed training on the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, School Board Roles and Responsibilities, Board Oversight, Ethics, Using School Data, Facilities, Roberts’ Rules of Order, Administrative Cost Grants, Emergency Planning, and more.
• Developed more than 100 pages of training on conducting fiscal and educational reviews of schools.
• Designed monitoring tools and related materials for fiscal, Special Education, and other reviews.
• Developed policies and forms for security, substance abuse, suicide prevention, sexual harassment, search and seizure, drug and  alcohol testing, anti-bullying, zero tolerance for weapons, and more.
• Organized a Safe Schools Symposium, featuring 29 speakers and drawing 288 attendees.
• Developed programs to address alcohol abuse and suicides among Native American youth. They included student-developed videos addressing this important topic.
• Developed Substance Abuse Prevention: Best Practices Resource Guide for Educators and a 112-page manual on Safe Schools Planning. We developed a Parents’ Guide to Mental Health, Student Health Guidelines, sample Memoranda of Understanding, Student Codes of Conduct, job descriptions, and nearly 20 forms ranging from Lost or Stolen Equipment Reports to School Entrance Health Forms.
• Conducted investigations and data analytics into fraud, waste, and abuse in educational systems and other organizations.
• Served as a subject matter expert on an engagement assisting the government of Indonesia in designing software with built-in algorithms to detect fraud in its procurement system.
• Designed and implemented 20 site visits to Bureau of Indian Education schools to gather ground-level information concerning safety/security and incident-reporting practices and issues. VWG designed protocols that included hundreds of questions – including those related to internal controls and information technology security - to ensure that the most accurate portrait of these issues possible would emerge. This was part of a larger project that included analysis of 230,000 school safety and misconduct reports, training, and other services. Our tools include custom-built databases.
• Analyzed payroll records for approximately 50,000 school employees and identified dozens of employees being paid for more than 250 hours a week, hundreds of active employees living across the country from their assigned work locations, two dozen employees with paychecks but no addresses, and much more.
• ​Assisted Chicago Public Schools in developing Safe Schools planning guides and provided a detailed security assessment of one of the system’s largest high schools.
• Served as the outsourced Inspector General of the Public Building Commission of Chicago.
• Evaluated business processes and performance in multi-billion-dollar organizations in the government and corporate sectors. Its founder and/or team has reviewed and recommended improvements in more than 20 major functions, ranging from information technology and recruitment to financial management systems. Such analyses require mapping business processes to support execution of performance objectives.​

FEATURED PROJECTS

Early Intervention
Early Intervention programs provide coordinated services to children with disabilities younger than age 3 and high-risk infants and toddlers. The Vander Weele Group’s success in delivering compliance monitoring services for the State of Illinois, the sixth largest Early Intervention system in the United States, affords us considerable expertise on program logistics, staffing, training, and reporting to share with our clients. 

We create agile and responsive compliance monitoring protocols and tools aligned with the Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, state laws, and agency rules.  We manage large-scale, complex compliance monitoring programs and provide continuous technical support infused with our deep knowledge of best practice.

We also harness data collected through compliance monitoring reviews and special investigations to identify systemic challenges and work closely with key partners and stakeholders to devise and enact solutions.

Read more about Early Intervention 

Bureau of Indian Education

In a five-year program, Vander Weele Group has provided compliance reviews, evaluations and technical assistance to nearly all of the 183 schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). The firm made on-site visits to more than 140 locations in 23 states.

The program initially focused on compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), and eventually with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004.

Each year, the Vander Weele Group has provided a final report with recommended systemic reforms that addresses challenges such as high leadership and teacher turnover, inadequate technological infrastructure, insufficient understanding of student achievement data to drive educational programs, insufficient parental involvement, excessive carryover funds, violations of internal controls, Going Concern problems (schools improperly budgeting and at risk of exhausting their funds), and more. BIE and schools use the information from the monitoring visits and ​these recommendations to drive new strategies, future training, and technical assistance. 
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This project demonstrates the firm’s ability to manage large-scale programs, hire and manage staff, develop internal and external communication tools, complete project deliverables in a high-quality manner on deadline, make business process and performance recommendations, measure implementation against grant applications, assist clients in developing strategies for systemic change, compare field conditions against federal mandates, manage/analyze data, assess internal controls, conduct evaluations, and more. Executing this volume of materials requires strong project management skills, one of the core competencies of the Vander Weele Group.​​
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Private Sector 

Private Sector Projects Include:

• A corporation saved $5 million to $7 million a year after Vander Weele Group analyzed approximately $40 million in credit card expenditures recorded on a PeopleSoft financial system and identified 145 suspect users, some of whom were criminally charged.
• ​A client processing millions of dollars of checks learned that nearly a half-million dollars were stolen. Using data analysis of phone records, Vander Weele Group identified the culprit within days, worked with the client to obtain a written confession, and supported the efforts of the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Attorney’s Office in indicting the employee, who was part of a multi-million-dollar Nigerian bank fraud ring.
• ​On behalf of a Fortune 500 company, Vander Weele Group performed more than 175 investigative projects, including a series of high-level financial investigations of allegations relevant to compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2001. Matters involved allegations of insider trading, kickbacks, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, unauthorized diversion of scrap, conflicts of interests, procurement fraud, accounting fraud, self-dealing, and more.
• ​A company claimed its revenues grew from $19.4 million to $155 million in three years. Asked to research the company, Vander Weele Group conducted investigative intelligence and found a revolving door of executives, unexecuted initiatives, disputes with customers, disputes with vendors, and nearly 80 civil actions—most of which were breach of contract—against the principals. Vander Weele Group expressed skepticism that a company with such a rocky history and operational problems could have achieved its stated revenue growth. When the company was later shut down for fraud, its principals were accused—and subsequently convicted—in connection to a scheme to inflate revenues by $250 million to obtain hundreds of millions of investment dollars. Its liabilities totaled $800 million. Our client escaped the losses.
• A former employee of a manufacturer was rumored to be pitching the company’s signature patented product to a national chain. Vander Weele Group investigated and documented what amounted to a confession of the scheme online when the former employee advertised anonymously for new employees, stating she and a colleague started the company to “take advantage of opportunities unrealized by our former employer.”
• As a subcontractor to a partner firm, Vander Weele Group conducted assessments of seven American manufacturing plants in China, Malaysia, and Singapore to prevent product diversion to the black market. Vander Weele Group designed a security audit program based on extensive security procedures provided by the manufacturer’s largest customer; conducted audits of the seven plants, and co-authored recommendations for development of a security compliance program. The project included data analytics.​
• Vander Weele Group conducted investigations into complex inventory fraud schemes in American manufacturing plants in Shanghai, China, and in Guadalajara, Mexico. Vander Weele Group used data analysis to show disparities in Certificates of Authenticity (COAs) entering the manufacturing line compared with COAs attached to product coming out of the Mexican plant. After one investigation, six employees in the Mexican operation were dismissed.
• A customer of an art gallery stole more than $100,000 of artwork. With only a name and no permanent address, Vander Weele Group conducted investigative intelligence to locate her family in a country home fueled only by a wood burning stove.
• A client was working with an individual on a major sales initiative with a foreign government agency. After the relationship was launched, our client requested background information on the individual. Within two days, our team informed the client the individual had been convicted of a decades old military crime in which he disposed of bodies out of a helicopter during the regime of a notorious dictator. Our research showed that his company was also embroiled in allegations of steering bids, a factor critical in our client’s consideration whether to continue the relationship.
• A client was about to invest $150,000 into an entity that promised to raise tens of millions in capital. Our investigation detected numerous inconsistencies, noting that the entity incorporated with the stated purpose of providing education based on the teachings of a controversial overseas cult leader who claimed divine powers. In fact, the leader was accused of sexually molesting boys and his organization was accused of trading in kidney parts. Former followers launched a group to foster healing among ex-converts, which included alleged child sexual abuse victims who launched an online discussion group.
• Vander Weele Group conducted investigative intelligence to locate a group of thieves who provided false identities as owners of a recycling operation that diverted product from a manufacturing plant. The product had improperly been deemed scrap.
• Vander Weele Group saved a maintenance company $1.6 million in union contributions by documenting errors in a union audit that claimed the company owed the money. We reconstructed data from hundreds of purchase orders to demonstrate the audit was faulty.
• Vander Weele Group conducted a forensic audit of more than $6 million in expenditures in connection to an investigation of allegations of fraud. Our team reconstructed and mapped financial data. We concluded that while numerous accounting errors occurred in an extremely complex accounting environment, no fraud occurred.
• Vander Weele Group provided support to a $2.5 billion insurance company by providing a forensic analysis of a fraudulent claim.
• The Vander Weele Group was employed to identify trends in bribery and kickbacks in Mexican real estate transactions to inform decision-making of a publicly owned Real Estate Investment Trust in its consideration of entering the Mexican marketplace. In a related project, the Vander Weele Group identified major risks associated with a Mexican hotelier whose family business had been engaged in nefarious business dealings. Our work entailed primarily online research.

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