The University has fired the employee responsible for the ‘NOHA’ fraud case
The University of Groningen (RUG) has fired an employee suspected of fraud. The university has also reported the fraud and related forgery of documents to the police. In total, the RUG has suffered a loss of 1.2 million euros. From this specific fraudulent activity.
The fraud concerns a foundation set up in 2014 by three members of the Faculty of Arts, called ‘NOHA’. The foundation ran under-the-radar until March 2019, when the University began an investigation into its funding. It was found that, amongst other things, both grants for research and tuition fees from students were incorporated into NOHA’s accounts.
One of the employees then declared substantial expenses from NOHA, and also made extra payments to themselves from the foundation.
Chairman of the Board Prof. Jouke de Vries says that he was shocked by the seriousness of the results of the enquiry. “Because of their actions, those involved have taken a great risk of reputation damage for the university,” he says. He continued to say that boundaries had been broken and the University has been forced to take action. “We will do everything in our power to restore the violated trust of our international partners,” he added.
This is not the first case of money being extracted fraudulently from the RUG. In 2016 the Head of Technical Management, along with a few other people, were found to have taken over 1.1 Million Euros from the University.
“We realise that the RUG has to deal with incidents more often,” De Vries says. “We will use the case studies to make it clear within the university that we don’t want this. We have clear rules for integrity, it is very important that employees act accordingly. “
In 2019 it was found that the University had also improperly accounted for hours and costs in relation to a possible RUG campus in Yantai, China. The University then had to pay back over a million euros for its misdemeanours.
