A number of South Korean universities have falsified financial information to strengthen their cases for increasing tuition fees, an investigation has found. The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) looked at 35 randomly selected universities and found that several had manipulated their accounts over the past five years to justify steep rises in fees, the Yonhap News Agency reported. The BAI estimated that doctoring of the books had produced 655.2 billion won (£367 million) in inappropriate income for the universities in the past five years. The watchdog said it would notify the education ministry of its findings so that the universities involved – including nine public institutions – could be penalised. In a separate investigation of 113 universities, 50 were found to have senior officials and professors embezzling school funds while neglecting their duties.