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Sep 7, 2019

House Arrest For Former Employee Who Embezzled From Social Security

     From the Star News:
A Chula Vista man who worked for the Social Security Administration was sentenced Aug. 30 to eight months home detention for embezzling $65,118.
Nam-Phong Hung Le, 37, has paid all the money back which is part of the reason why he was placed on three years probation in U.S. District Court.
Judge Janis Sammartino ordered Le to pay an additional $34,890, which is a judgement found against him that relates to the fraud. He will have to pay for electronic monitoring of his house arrest.
Le worked as a technical expert in the Social Security Administration office in El Cajon and later in the downtown San Diego offices.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Hill asked for a 1-year sentence in prison, saying money was taken from six people’s Social Security accounts, including several who were deceased and whose payments should have stopped. ...

5 comments:

  1. These in house scams are terrible. But the real problem is malware. SSA has very outdated systems. It pays out a trillion $ a year to 63 million people. If that breaks down, it will be a disaster. We need huge amounts spent to upgrade the infrastructure

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  2. What do you know about SSA’s systems? SSA is continually updating their systems. There may be a couple of unimportant outdated systems. All important systems are modern.

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  3. @ 9:14 - That is not what we were told at a recent training held by SSA for reps. The person speaking for SSA said that their IT was terribly outdated and they had some systems still running DOS. So, who's not telling us the truth?

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  4. @ 9:40 - The person speaking for SSA, who either is repeating something that they have no knowledge of or making statements to justify poor performance or budget requests.

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  5. There are legacy systems that have not all been upgraded. And every upgrade creates a new problem to solve for employees. For instance, the current SSI Claims system (a recent replacement for the 20+ year old MSSICS. More automated features, but the switchover is gradual, not instantaneous. And the bugs need to be worked out. This new system is pickier; doesn't like changes in its structure, as the old system allowed staff to do. Which means more terminations and re-establishing of SSI records. More manual actions than before. Like the new system doesn't want the clutter of the old data, although it all is integrated. And necessary.

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