One of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains, Corinthian Colleges, stands to lose federal funding due to allegations that it cooked its books on job placement figures. Financial aid and grants courtesy of the federal government are the lifelines of Corinthian and companies like it.

Losing the government dollars would spell its certain dissolution.

However, Corinthian is no stranger to the Washington beltway, having spent $2 million in lobbying lawmakers from both parties, and recently received an emergency line of accelerated federal financial aid payments to the tune of $16 million.

The Miami Herald reports:

Once-mighty Corinthian Colleges chain is at the end of its run

Corinthian, which operates 10 Florida campuses and bases its online operations out of Tampa, is nearing the end. It’s currently under investigation by Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. Attorneys general in California and Massachusetts have filed lawsuits. U.S. Department of Education documents, meanwhile, say Corinthian “has admitted to falsifying placement rates and/or grade and attendance records at various institutions.”

The company, once a star player in the for-profit college sphere, denies the allegations. It also denies that it admitted to what the U.S. Department of Education says it admitted to.

But the suspicion surrounding job placement rates led federal education officials to request certain documentation earlier this year. Five months passed and Corinthian still hadn’t supplied the required proof, and so the government recently placed the for-profit chain on a “heightened” cash monitoring status. That creates delays when the government makes its financial aid payments, and those payments are the company’s lifeblood.

Corinthian receives $1.4 billion in Pell grants and federal student loans each year, which represents 85 percent of total revenues.

Faced with a slowdown in those dollars, Corinthian announced it might close, and the federal government then swooped in last week with a $16 million life preserver — in the form of accelerated financial aid payments. The move was unprecedented, and some have likened it to a bank-style bailout.