From the Daily Herald of Chicago:
A 42-year-old woman who used to work in the Social Security Administration's Aurora office was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing more than $700,000 in fake benefits.
Federal prosecutors said Anne Aroste, 42, of Montgomery, worked in the federal agency's Aurora field office between 2013 and 2018 and pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
She admitted that she used the identities of dead workers to create new applications for Social Security benefits and used her credentials to approve the applications and funnel the benefits to bank accounts she controlled. ...
5 comments:
Seems light. I would assume she has to repay the money too. Penalties for non employees are frequently probation and restitution for amounts that are admittedly less but still over $100K.
It angers me to see this. The fraud seems to always come from within social security, not all from the claimants. But the stigma of fraud always seems to fall on the claimants when politicians (and people in general) talk of fraud and SSA.
The dead workers should have been removed from the computer system.
anon@10:07pm,
She was probably intercepting the death reports and just not inputting them.
The agency's EDR (electronic death registration) process with the individual states has been slowly expanding across the country for years, but as each new state begins participation it only begins from that point forward for that state (i.e. no retroactive death reports). Even then, EDR isn't perfect and you will still see significant numbers of death reports with no proof of death that don't result from EDR reporting (primarily because most states just take whatever SSN the family gives the coroner for the death certificate and do not bother to verify it). If the death certificate has the wrong SSN on it, it will fall out of the EDR reporting process when the name/DOB/SSN doesn't match with SSA records.
Honestly, I take it as a personal insult whenever agency personnel are caught pulling this crap and then aren't absolutely crucified for it as it makes all of us look bad. The only way to make it stop happening is to totally bury those people with no mercy, and then make sure all employees know why it was done.
This, on the other hand, was just a literal slap on the wrist for what she stole.
Just as bad as the rep making CPS payments years ago to her aunt. Second pin had to be put in place after that.
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