Taxpayers will foot the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars in student loans that will be forgiven for students who were defrauded by the schools or who were enrolled when their campuses shut down.

The culprit in both cases was the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, the nation’s largest accrediting body of for-profit schools. The Education Department is taking steps to shut the outfit down, but it’s late in doing so — Acics had been investigated for shoddy practices long before the Corinthian and ITT debacles.

In June, a study by the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, uncovered 90 cases in which Acicshad given clean bills of health to for-profit schools that were already under state or federal investigation. According to the report, the president of a now-defunct Florida school whom the accreditor singled out for praise in 2011 was later convicted for stealing federal financial aid, enrolling ineligible students and fabricating high school diplomas.

Lax oversight is hardly unique to the for-profit sector. An investigation last year by The Wall Street Journal found that so-called watchdogs of higher education rarely take aggressive action. In a particularly striking example, the investigation found that about a dozen colleges had been given an accreditor’s seal of approval despite having graduation rates below 10 percent.