Cashing A Dead Woman's Checks For 26 Years

     From Huffington Post  :

Willie Mae Shaughnesy died in 1984, according to Texas state records. But that didn't stop the government from sending her Social Security checks, and allegedly, it didn't stop her son from cashing them. 

Last week, a U.S. attorney in southeast Texas charged Kline Fisher Budd, an 80-year-old man believed to be Shaughnesy's son, with theft of government property  . ...

The whole thing began to unravel in 2010 when someone at the Social Security Administration decided to check up on Shaughnesy after noticing that she would have been more than 104 years old at that point. By then, according to the U.S. attorney's office, the SSA had paid more than $231,000   into Shaughnesy's account following her death.

Threats In Tennessee

     From WKRN:

Police arrested a man after he made threats against workers at the Murfreesboro [Tennessee] social security office on Monday. 

Suspect Brian Bottoms is accused of telling an employee "He might just have to do something destructive" after he learned he could not get money he thought he was owed to pay child support....

In 1995, Bottoms and his brother were arrested after they threatened to kidnap the former publisher of The Tennessean John Seigenthaler and WLAC radio talk show host Les Jameson. 

Officers raided the brothers' home and located three pipe bombs. ...

Agents searched his car [yesterday] and found cleaning supplies, a cinder block and a guitar.

CDI Unit Active In Utah

     This is from an piece, which mostly concerns allegations of workers compensation fraud, posted by a Utah television station:

People who feign disabilities in Utah can get away with millions of dollars – money you pay into social security and money employers pay to cover accidents on the job. ...
 
Workers compensation is a private insurer that began as a state agency. On the federal level, the Social Security Administration provides disability benefits. 

It has a "Cooperative Disability Investigation Unit" - operating in Salt Lake for roughly a year – which tries to stop fraud before it starts.

In a recent 3 month period, the local CDI unit, as it's called, says it confirmed 42 cases of fraud or "similar fault."

$200?

     From KPBS:

A National City [California] psychologist was arrested and charged today on suspicion of completing and selling immigration and Social Security forms falsely stating that his patients had a medical disability. 

Dr. Roberto J. Velasquez, 55, was charged with making false statements in immigration documents and applications for Supplemental Security Income disability benefits. ...


For a fee of $200, Velasquez would provide a form falsely stating that a person qualified for a medical disability exception, even though the person had no actual disability, according to the affidavit. 

Velasquez was also completing medical reports for people seeking to file applications for Social Security Administration's Supplemental Security Income program, authorities said. Velasquez would falsely state that those people had a medical disability, according to the affidavit.

      I've been representing Social Security disability claimants for more than 30 years and this is the first time I've heard of this happening. I expect it's happened but it's certainly uncommon.  It's not hard to understand why it's rare. Note that the psychologist is alleged to have charged only $200. That's not much money to get in return for prostituting yourself as well as risking jail and the loss of your professional license but that's about all you could hope to get for doing this because the claimants involved are so poor. You'd have to be pretty desperate or depraved or stupid to do it.

A Warm, Fuzzy Easter Story

From the Battle Creek Enquirer:

The pastor of a Foxborough, Mass., church has been charged with attempting to scam four elderly people out of their Social Security checks by telling them they were lottery winners.

One of the victims is Margaret Swartz, 84, of Athens.

“He called me in March and told me I had won a bunch of money,” she said today, while in the midst of coloring Easter eggs.

She told him she only deserved money she earned.

“He said the government gives out money to people with a very good work record and I fell for it.”

The pastor told Swartz he needed her Social Security number. ...

Ranulfo Luther Raposo of the Seventh-day Adventist Church pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges including attempted larceny and identity fraud. He was granted $5,000 bail.Police say all the alleged victims are in their 70s and 80s, live in Michigan, New Mexico and Arkansas, and are unconnected with the church.

Tennessee Man Arrested For Threatening ALJ

From KNOX:

A Knoxville man was arrested by federal agents when they learned he had been released from a mental health facility only a few days after allegedly vowing to murder a judge he had already stalked once in an ambush try.

Last month, Roy Kenneth Wade Jr. voluntarily sought help for depression and thoughts of killing himself, but during his medical and mental health evaluation stated that he also intended to kill Social Security Administrative Law Judge K. Dickson Grissom, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court. ...

Wade expressed "overwhelming anger and hate toward Judge Grissom" and was "adamant" in his desire to kill him, according to the affidavit. Wade added that he had a 9mm handgun and had already waited outside Grissom's office to shoot him, but that plan fell through when Grissom did not come out, according to the affidavit.

65 Year Old Arrested For Threatening Social Security Employees

    From CBS Chicago:

A 65-year-old man upset with reductions to his benefits allegedly threatened to kill employees at the Social Security Administration this week.

The Department of Homeland Security took Frank Logan’s reported threats seriously enough to have local police obtain a warrant for Logan’s arrest, Joliet Cmdr. Brian Benton said.Logan has called the office in Wilkes Barre, Pa., when he was unhappy his check was reduced and became irate at the answers he received,” Benton said.  ...

In Case You Weren't Aware, Ohio Has A Republican Governor

From NBC4 in Ohio:

Inside a large building on the north side of Columbus is one of the most important offices in state government.

"We have about 600 employees now and we do over 212,000 claims for Ohioans with disabilities now for Social Security," said Erik Williamson, deputy director of the Division of Disability Determination with the Rehabilitation Services Commission (RSC).

It’s in the smallest office, where a handful of workers check to see who's above board in their claims, that some of the most important work is being performed.

The RSC said it is leading the country in fraud detection, recovering $42 million in fraud cases just last year.

"I think the nuances that you have to aware of is that with the economy the way it is, there are people trying to scam not just this system, any type of entitlement system to try and figure out how to pay rent," said Kevin Miller, the agency's director.

"The trend right now seems to be following mental allegations where as it was at one time more often physical," said Tom Melfo, manager of the Division of Disability Determination. ...

[L]ast year $6.5 billion was paid out in disability benefits.

At this rate, the fund will be dried up by 2017.

One of the problems, the agency said, is the number of lawyers trying to get the benefits that have been denied approved.

Their commercials are often aired during daytime programming.

Direct Deposit Fraud

     A television station in Tampa is reporting that there have been two dozen instances locally in recent months of Social Security direct deposits being diverted to bank accounts not controlled by the person who is supposed to be receiving the money. 

     This is highly worrisome since it may be impossible to prevent under current practices and could spread quickly. I don't think this is the last we will hear of this problem.

Pathetic

From the New York Daily News:

Frank Lucas, who once ran a billion-dollar business smuggling heroin before going straight, could go to jail for bilking the U.S. government out of $17,300.

Now 81 and ailing, Lucas was charged with theft by deception after he allegedly told the U.S. Treasury he lost a Social Security check with funds earmarked for his 15-year-old son and asked for a duplicate, prosecutors said.

Arizona Governor Investigated For Social Security Fraud

     There is a report that Arizona governor Jan Brewer has been under investigation for Social Security fraud. Let me hasten to say that the report suggests nothing more to me than an overpayment. The situation is that Governor Brewer's son, Ron, is severely mentally ill. Ron's father died. Ron started receiving disabled adult child benefits on his father's account. Governor Brewer was made his representative payee. In 1989 Ron was found not guilty of kidnapping and sexual assault by reason of insanity. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital. In 1995 the Social Security Act was changed to make individuals confined to a psychiatric hospital after being found not guilty by reason of insanity ineligible for benefits. This made Ron ineligible for Social Security benefits but Governor Brewer never informed Social Security. Ron was overpaid by $75,000.

     Anyone want to put Governor Brewer in jail for being unaware of an obscure change in the Social Security Act? I don't think so but an Arizona paper says that Social Security's Inspector General has investigated and has presented the case to the Department of Justice which seems uninterested in prosecuting. The newspaper seem obsessive about pursuing this matter.

     A few points here:

• Republicans in Congress are eager to investigate Social Security overpayments. They imply that overpayments are due to rampant fraud at Social Security. They want aggressive action to root out this fraud and to punish the wrongdoers. As this case shows, plenty of Social Security's overpayments are due to the complexity of the programs the agency is administering. These overpayments happen to Republicans as well as Democrats.
• Investigating routine overpayments as if they were fraud is a waste of money and would harass a lot of honorable people, many of them Republicans.
• When they write about mental illness, many Republicans like to put the term "mental illness" in quotation marks. I doubt that Governor Brewer does this. I would wish a chronically mentally ill child on people who do this but that would be too cruel a punishment.

Incident At Denver Office

     A local TV station in Denver is reporting on a report that a Social Security claimant at a local Social Security office was punched. Who did it and why are not reported.

Grand Jury Investigation in West Virginia

     The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a federal grand jury is investigating whether former Social Security Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) David Daughtry received improper payments in exchange for awarding disability benefits. According to the report, Social Security's Inspector General is looking into a "series" of ALJs who award benefits in a high number of cases.
     Daughtry awarded benefits to virtually every claimant whose case he heard. Certainly, this would have included the cases of at least several attorneys and a fair number of unrepresented claimants.  I don't recommend any sort of bribery but why would someone even be tempted to bribe an ALJ to approve a disability claim if the ALJ would approve the claim even without being bribed? Why use a sledgehammer to break down a door that is not only unlocked but which is standing wide open? Of course, these is a suggestion that there was some funny business about the assignment of cases to ALJs in that office and there could be impropriety there. Still, count me as skeptical that they will ever come up with evidence of any serious criminal offense here. Social Security has a long list of problems but corruption is very, very low on that list.

     One interesting aspect of the report is that the Wall Street Journal has used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain a list of total fees paid in 2010 to attorneys who represent Social Security claimants. One attorney that ALJ Daughtry dealt with, Eric Conn, ranked third in the nation on this list with fees of $3.8 million. Presumably, the Wall Street Journal will release more of this list in the future.

The Horror In Philadelphia

From the Associated Press:

Authorities in at least two states missed opportunities to help four mentally disabled adults who were discovered locked in a squalid Philadelphia basement while police say a convicted murderer stole their Social Security checks.

Linda Weston, the woman charged with orchestrating the scheme, was legally disqualified from cashing the victims' government disability checks because of her criminal past. ...

Weston, 51, was charged Monday with kidnapping, false imprisonment and other offenses after her landlord stumbled on the four adults, all weak and malnourished, in a dank, foul-smelling boiler room over the weekend. Her bail was set at $2.5 million.

Also charged were Gregory Thomas, 47, whom Weston described as her boyfriend, and Eddie "the Rev. Ed" Wright, 50. ...

Social Security spokesman Mark Hinkle declined to provide details of the agency's investigation into Weston but said the agency recently strengthened oversight of payees.

"We are very concerned about this situation," Hinkle said via email.

Former Social Security Employee To Be Sentenced

From the Gadsden (AL) Times:

A January sentencing date has been set for a former Social Security Administration employee who pleaded guilty to sending a white, powdery substance to two of her supervisors in 2009, according to federal court documents.

Michelle Holladay Ryder, 43, signed a plea agreement on Oct. 4 admitting that she mailed two letters from the Boaz Post Office that contained non-dairy creamer and included handwritten notes with derogatory remarks to two of her supervisors. ...

At the time the letters were mailed, Ryder worked at the Albertville Social Security office.

Victim And Alleged Assailant Identified In Yesterday's Woodlawn Assault

The victim of yesterday's assault near Social Security headquarters in Woodlawn, MD has been identified as Obie Blackmon, a Social Security employee. He is recovering at Sinai Hospital. Gary Stokes, 25, has been charged with several crimes, including attempted murder, for the assault.

More On Shooting Near SSA Headquarters

From the Baltimore Sun:

An employee taking a lunchtime stroll during a break from his job at the Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn was robbed and shot on a secluded wooded path on Monday, prompting officials to put the federal campus on lockdown.


The shooting occurred about 11:45 a.m. off Social Security property. Police said the victim walked or stumbled back toward the sprawling complex and collapsed on an access road near Woodlawn Drive and Parallel Road, near the entrance to the Social Security West building and a series of parking lots.


Detectives had not made any arrests as of Monday evening. The victim, whose name and age were not disclosed, was taken by ambulance to Sinai Hospital in Northwest Baltimore. Police said his injuries were not considered life threatening. ... 

Shortly after 3 p.m, Baltimore County police were called back to the Social Security Administration complex for a report of a suspicious package. Police said the package contained a pair of eyeglasses, and police were gone by 4 p.m. 

Police said occupants of one building were briefly evacuated.

Lockdown In Baltimore

From CBS Baltimore:

The Social Security Administration facility is on lockdown after a robbery and shooting near its headquarters in Baltimore County.

The robbery did not occur on the campus of the Social Security Administration, but SSA was notified because the suspect has not yet been apprehended.

Baltimore County Police were called to Woodlawn Drive and Parallel Road at 11:43 a.m. Monday. They are on the scene of a shooting in the woods near Walden Circle. 

Police say the victim, an adult male, has suffered non life-threatening injuries and will be transported to Sinai Hospital.

The suspect was last seen running down Woodlawn Drive.

Update: OK, it's over.

Maybe He Really Is Disabled

From the Traverse City Record-Eagle:

A Kingsley man who crashed his van into the Social Security Administration Office in Traverse City "in a fit of rage" over repeated disability claim denials finally had his claim approved.

Douglas McCallum, 47, stands to receive about $1,000 a month in Social Security disability benefits, despite pending criminal charges for damaging the SSA office building and sign.

Man Shot To Death At Detroit Social Security Office

CBS Detroit reports that "One man is killed, another flees on foot Friday night around 5:30 p.m. after a Detroit security guard fires nine shots at two men who jumped a fence at the Social Security office near Wyoming and 7 Mile Road."

Update: There was a break-in at the Social Security office but there are serious questions about the security guard's behavior.