The Inspector General for the Social Security Administration, Gail S. Ennis, today announced Federal charges of wire fraud against a former senior financial analyst for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, for an alleged fraud scheme involving the Social Security Administration and the Federal Reserve System’s disability programs. ...
Lawrence Rufrano, who made his initial appearance October 28, 2020 in the Northern District of California, is alleged to have worked as executive director of a financial technology laboratory at a university and various law firms while collecting both long-term disability benefits from the Federal Reserve System and Social Security Disability Insurance benefits. The fraud loss is estimated to be $185,000. ...
According to the complaint, Rufrano did not report his outside employment to either disability benefit program despite requirements to do so. ...
Rufrano was Executive Director of Stanford University's Future of Digital Currency Institute.
12 comments:
I wonder if he had a representative that helped get him benefits?
This isn't smart people doing dumb things.
It's entitled greedy people doing entitled greedy things. It's really not hard to understand.
I hope the doctor who testified on his behalf is also under investigation. Does anyone know how likely that is?
Social Security is good at catching fraud rather quickly. I've noticed most come from within SSA itself, employees and such. It's somewhat rare to find a claimant doing this kind of stuff. 9:20 said it perfect.... greedy people. Report income and they're cool. Don't report income, well... one, it makes claimants look bad, and two, it gives politicians ammo to mess with the system, and three, prosecution for fraud isn't a good job reference after jail time.
5:47 pm - I'm going to call out your comment that most comes from employees.
See https://oig.ssa.gov/audits-and-investigations/investigations and read through the reports from OIG and employee fraud isn't common. It's not rare to find it being done by a claimant or beneficiary. Given Covid, it's interesting to see what has been done in 2020.
He got caught so maybe he's not that smart after all.
8:50, considering there are about 70 million beneficiaries and about 2 million claimants every year, I'd say fraud is rare among them too. It's rare for SSA employees, bank employees, rep payees, friends and family of beneficiaries, and lots of other groups as well--it does happen, but there's really no way to accurately describe it as "not rare."
12:50 Just going to say that context is everything. Overall, yes, fraud is uncommon in the programs. But when it does occur, and it does, and you examine the actors within the set of cases where fraud occurs, the statement made above that it seems to be mostly employees isn't true. In the context of fraudulent actors, employee fraud is "rare". Looking at OIG information, it is fair to say the majority of perpetrators of fraud against the system are non-employees.
This is more likely to be a scenario of "failure to report" work activity , a post entitlement issue. Rather than an initial entitlement issue involving a doctor re: 12:19 and representative re: 9:04. He was likely nailed based on interface with his earnings record triggering a Work Continuing Disability Review.
REALLY got to wonder why this guy was not caught earlier on a wCDR. Who was kicking the earnings alerts down the road? or was this bene getting 1099's and our wcdr people kept buying some argument that he only worked for a month in the whole year, getting a TWP month every year?
@5:47 PM:
I have to doubt you have worked for the agency, and clearly you haven't done work CDR investigations much. It's rather common to find claimants and benes hiding stuff, and we rarely, rarely push the topic of similar fault, let alone fraud. We just try to correct the records for payment (e.g. payment suspension months), and if we've got solid evidence, we terminate them.
On the other side, the penalties to employees, for even small infractions is rather high. I have heard of cases were there was some collusion between an employee and outsiders, and they got fired (losing their pensions and sometimes serving time).
But honestly, if we even accidentally look at the wrong SSN in a query, we get investigated. If we've been found to access to an ssn with intent to make some financial gain, that alone is good enough to be terminated. The vast majority of employees are highly concerned about making a wrong move in what they even look at.
Overall, I suspect your opinion is likely driven by some political attitude, rather than any experience with the situations involved.
@9:20 AM
how would we know if it was "most likely post entitlement" ? It could easily have been both initial (many psych practitioners are quite liberal in their leanings and MSS's about claimant's limitations, and SSA/DDS only needs to agree with some statement that the claimant "could not keep up with the normal stresses of a typical 40 hour work week" to put the claimant on. Its not uncommon that DDS does that, even in the face of contradicting medical evidence. Then again, DDS doesn't even need to get other evidence. An MSS provided (even without the required supporting longitudinal records) might be good enough to for an examiner to push the case through to allowance ... and off the DDS work queue.
Post a Comment