Posted on 08/04/2010 11:01:20 AM PDT by reader25
Hundreds of federal employees may have improperly reaped millions in Social Security disability benefits, according to a government watchdog that caught workers at several major agencies pocketing fraudulent payments.
The Government Accountability Office issued a report that showed at least 1,500 federal employees may have wrongly received benefits. The group's investigation, which focused on two Social Security programs for people who have limited incomes due to disabilities, found several specific cases in which beneficiaries were earning well above the income cap while still receiving benefits. In one case, a Transportation Security Administration screener was overpaid $108,000, according to the report.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
And a polar ice cap still out of view.
Not me.
This is nothing. They won;t even look for the ones taking
bribes to put persons on disability and then look the other way.
When Obama Care kicks in you’ll have to pay under the table to get a pass to the front of the line.
...government run amok at work......
And won’t it be just great when they have electronic access to our bank accounts to pay for Obamacare. Nope, no chance of skimming or fraud there!!
Long prison terms for every damn one of them! IN ALASKA!....................MAybe we could rent a gulag or two from Russia.................
But I’m sure if we just grow government larger and give them access to more money this wouldn’t happen. /s
Cant we just open our own medical schools for doctors that arent on the government’s teat? We can call it Galt’s School of Medicine
Shocking!/s
Federal employees STEALING from the taxpayers?
I’m shocked... ...SHOCKED I say!!
I wonder why (illegal aliens receiving benefits and Federal Workers receiving illegal benefits).
But that this would be considered unfair targeting of people who doing things illegally...
The GAO suggested that the Social Security Administration start making better use of its automated system to catch overpayments in the future.
Problem solved!
Recoup the money the same way STUDENT LOANS are recouped — take away money from TAX REFUNDS and FUTURE SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS (and reduce GOVERNEMENT RETIREMENT PAYMENTS to compensate).
Remember these are US government employees who simply went on disability for a time and then returned to work.
The US government runs their payroll system and the Social Security supplemental benefit program.
BOTH PROGRAMS ~ UNITY OF PURPOSE IN A SINGLE COMMAND (hunh? ~ that's usually the argument Democrats make for tacking miscellaneous and disparate government agencies and programs together to create a new cabinet level department).
Well, obviously it didn't work 1500 times!
The agency personnel people have NO excuse for not having noticed that their totally computerized payroll systems had already flagged these people as being disabled and off the clock.
The fact they started getting a new fulltime paycheck is programmed into the system.
This sort of thing simply can't happen UNLESS someone in the agency personnel or payroll system is STEALING.
I once encountered this at USPS ~ (btw they "fixed the system") ~ I wanted to target personnel in specific job categories with a special mailing of the postal rule book called "The Domestic Mail Manual" or DMM.
I went through the system picking all the job codes needed to target the desired population (mostly managers and supervisors). Bingo, I got a dozen reports back from the field that "We don't have this position anymore, so what's up?".
Several major field installations had gone through a reorganization and certain job numbers were abolished, as were the positions assigned those numbers. There were NO EMPLOYEES at the target site that met the selection criteria. But, THEY WERE STILL GETTING CHECKS, and a quick followup revealed THE CHECKS WERE GETTING CASHED.
The crook had set up a very simple system ~ he was a personnel clerk and didn't send in the appropriate paperwork to abolish the jobs and to stop using those job codes at that site. There were copycats at work who'd done the same thing in other places too.
The fake employees all had bank accounts that would accept deposit of the erroneously issued checks. The crook was also on the signature card and he'd regularly tap the account for his ill-gotten gains.
I pretty much paid my salary for the rest of my life catching those little scams.
A popular private sector scam used by any number (about "more than a million") of small businesses is to create a fake employee.
The employee gets paid, pays taxes (at a lower rate than the boss/owner of course) and to make sure it all looks legitimate the employee BUYS A MONTHLY BOND.
The problem you have to get around to make this work is to make sure the bond is never forwarded to a new address ~ otherwise there'll be a Treasury initiated address verification and the owner/boss will get caught.
Of course the guys doing the scam are following an internet rulebook that doesn't tell them everything they need to know so they invariably change the fake employee's address to their own, or that of a confederate, so they can recover the income tax refund checks!
The bonds ended up in a Treasury warehouse near Pittsburgh ~ a HUGE warehouse in fact, with gazillions of returned bonds.
Income tax sleuths simply go through the trays of returned bonds to find tax fraud elsewhere.
Kind of like a self-enforcing mechanism ~ and I suspect IRS is the author of the "handbook" on how to do this.
There, if you read all the way through this post you know what to avoid when you sign up your fake employee(s) for bonds!
Don't do it!
An obligatory indictment of the private sector included, I see.
How does receiving a commercial drivers license after being put on disability equal defrauding of government disability programs? Perhaps in some cases, the drivers licensee was working while receiving payments but there could also be legitimate reasons for getting that sort of license while on disability, it seems to me, not the least of which is renewing a current commercial license.
The GAO found that the Social Security Administration does not use its own automated system to flag workers who may be earning too much income to qualify for benefits.
estimating that 1,500 workers were receiving about $1.7 million monthly. Of them, one-quarter were U.S. Postal Service employees and 16 percent were Defense Department civilians.
the TSA employee started receiving disability benefits in 1995 for “mood and anxiety disorders.” But she started full-time work in 2003 and earned as much as $50,000; the income cap after which disability payments are supposed to stop was $940 per month in 2008.
a Postal Service worker in Michigan received an overpayment of about $45,000. That worker was approved for “mood and personality disorders” in 2004 but returned to work later that year. The payments continued through early 2007, and then picked up again in late 2008. According to the report, a repayment of about $37,000 was made in 2008.
62,000 workers who received commercial driver’s licenses after they were deemed eligible for full disability benefits
It will be worse than that. Much of Congressional staff time today is spent dealing with senior's problems with social security and medicare. Add problems with National Socialist Healthcare for all in a few years.
When a spouse or child is denied a life saving operation by Hussein's death panel, the solution will be to seek political help from one's Congressman. If your Congressman is a rat, who do you think will get front of the line attention? Would it not be those with a "D" after their name in the voter rolls? How about those who donated to rat campaigns?
We only think political corruption is awful now.
I’m assuming union dues are from a percentage of whatver the (overpaid) income is...so it’s a win/win for Dimocraps.
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