An independent watchdog agency, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), from the U.S. Department of Education, is charged with ferreting out waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars in both K-12 and postsecondary education. OIG's official mission is to "promote the efficiency, effectiveness, and integrity of the [Education] Department's programs and operations." It primarily fulfills that mission as an investigative body and completes about 25 audits and 250-300 investigations each year. OIG works to make government agencies more accountable while protecting taxpayer dollars from improprieties and fraud--exactly the trust-restoring role that lawmakers had in mind when they created the inspectors general. This paper describes the 2017 OIG audit and report on Western Governors University (WGU) as a case study of how OIG can stubbornly reject innovation and flexibility to guard against fraud. It also discusses how, compared to postsecondary education, K-12 systems and policies garner less attention from OIG, particularly with respect to policy recommendations. Overall, the paper recommends that policymakers who are directly accountable to taxpayers must take a broad range of interests into consideration--a holistic view in which OIG's perspective is one of several, and its interest in preventing fraud is one of many public goods.