More than two dozen Cambodian refugees in Oakland and elsewhere in the East Bay are fighting allegations that they fraudulently applied for benefits from the Social Security Administration and say they were unfairly targeted. ...Many of the Cambodians are patients of Mona Afary, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in working with Afghans and Cambodian refugees. She now works with the refugees at the Center for Empowerment of Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland.
Afary has diagnosed many of her patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes several people in the same family, Weiss and Lunsford said. That — combined with what Social Security may see as Afary's lack of proper clinical training to make such diagnoses — could have triggered the investigations, Afary, her patients' attorneys and spokespeople for Social Security said.
The attorneys accused investigators of lacking the clinical training to assess whether someone was truly faking mental illness, as well as cultural insensitivity toward people who were traumatized by the harsh privations suffered under the Khmer Rouge. Many of the refugees came here in the 1980s. ...
This is not the first time Cambodians and their health care providers have been the target of Social Security fraud investigations. Similar investigations have taken place in Southern California, Boston and Washington state over the last decade. In those cases, some parties involved with the Cambodians were accused of fraud and others cleared ...
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