An Update on a Small Educational Entity

By David North on January 30, 2016

We published a posting about the American College of Commerce and Technology, Falls Church, Va., in August 2014 saying, among other things, that while the organization was licensed by the Department of Homeland Security to teach foreign students, it was not accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

This week we received the following from ACCT, which we reprint verbatim:

I am the representative of American College of Commerce and Technology(ACCT).

We noticed that there is a passage on your website which says that ACCT is unaccredited. However ACCT had been accredited April 2015. Your report had brought bad influence to our school. Could you help us delete the report or do some necessary modify?

The following link are your report and the prove from ACICS.

The link was to our 2014 posting, "Should a School with a Financial Statement Like This Be Authorized to Teach Accounting to Foreign Students?". I could not find "the prove from ACICS", but that entity's website shows the accreditation.

In that post, we pointed out that the chief executive of ACCT had signed off on a financial report, filed with the Commonwealth of Virginia, that managed to spell the word "interest" four different ways in the course of five lines of type and included some highly puzzling financial reporting.

More than half a year passed after our blog was published before the accreditation was secured, and another nine months passed before ACCT called it to our attention. For the record, it now has accreditation from the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). Accreditation by this organization has also been extended to, among others, three institutions (not apparently connected to ACCT) that have been in the news recently.

There is Herguan University, once raided by Homeland Security investigators, whose founder, former owner, former president, and former CEO, Jerry Wang, has been sent to jail for immigration fraud, as noted here and here.

The other two entities, both in the San Francisco Bay Area, are Silicon Valley University and Northwestern Polytechnic University, both of which have complained that some of the aliens they admitted as students have been turned back by immigration inspectors at U.S. airports, or denied the right to board Air India planes headed for San Francisco.

NPU's top executive, incidentally, also signed off on a financial report replete with errors, including spelling the name of the university in various ways.

ACCT's website indicates that it offers classes in both accounting and in English.