The city Education Department shelled out taxpayer money for scores of GPS units clearly unrelated to DOE vehicles — including one off the coast of Africa and about 30 in California, a scathing new report shows.

The global glitch is just the tip of the iceberg of massive, multimillion-dollar issues with the DOE’s school-bus tracking system, according to the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigation.

A SCI report released Monday asserts that the GPS company Navman “billed the DOE for duplicate license plate numbers, vehicle identification numbers (“VIN), serial numbers, and instances where devices sat in parking lots and other non-DOE locations such as California and off the coast of Africa.”

A DOE worker noted the Africa snafu in a Sept. 9, 2015, e-mail to a department employee who was supposed to be helping manage the system.

“We seem to have a bus off the coast of Africa,’’ the underling quipped — adding a smiley face to his note.

Another e-mail in July 2018 from a DOE employee to a deputy finance director added, “We’re seeing about 30 GPS units that have been in [California] at TTNM [Teletrac Navman]’s office for more than a year that are showing up on our monthly invoices.”

Some of the other GPS devices would show buses still in the DOE yard when they were “at least 15 miles away doing PM runs,’’ the report said. On the flip side, some buses were shown to be moving when they were known to be parked in the department yard, according to SCI’s probe.

The waste only came to light when the SCI investigators began looking into the system, the report said.

“From the beginning, the Navman project lacked oversight, accountability, communication, and employees with the technical abilities to oversee a large-scale management project — that ultimately failed when no usable data was retrieved,” according to the document issued by the office of SCI chief Anastasia Coleman.

Navman did not immediately return a request for comment from The Post.