Prodigy asserts that it has more than two million members in the United States, although analysts say the company routinely inflates its figures by counting multiple users of a single account, not just the number of paying accounts.

But Mr. Kassner said the number was probably quite small, since, he said, importers routinely inflate the number of licenses they need, in hopes that they will sell more weapons than they actually wind up selling.

The directors of the Comptronix Corporation, whose stock collapsed last week after its top officers confessed to routinely inflating its profits, learned of the wrongdoing at least 10 days before they disclosed that news to public investors, the company's interim chairman said today.

Dr. Crew has come under criticism in recent weeks with the release of two reports alleging that teachers have helped students cheat on standardized tests and that high schools routinely inflate attendance figures to increase their state aid.

Colleges know which applicants go to public schools and which go to elite prep schools and are well aware of which schools routinely inflate grades and which ones do not.

The Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs accuse the corps of routinely inflating the economic benefits of its projects.

In the last few days, the pressure has been compounded by reports alleging that teachers have cheated on standardized tests and that high schools routinely inflate attendance to increase their state aid.

But well before that debacle, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and others had found that the agency routinely inflated the economic payoffs of its construction projects to justify steadily greater budget outlays, while underestimating the environmental damage of those projects.

Four years after investigators uncovered corruption in the management of hundreds of luxury co-ops and condominiums in Manhattan, prosecutors are looking into whether contractors and managing agents took part in kickback schemes that routinely inflated the cost of repairs at thousands of middle-class apartment houses throughout the city.