People hustle the system all the time, but only some of the perpetrators seem to bear the brunt of the public’s scrutiny and scorn.
Worcester resident Vida Ofori Causey, for example, became a sort of cause celebre for those charging high crimes and waste of taxpayer dollars in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program when she was caught buying food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar and charging the government the full value of the benefit.
She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to forfeit $3.5 million and pay restitution.
You do the crime, you do the time; that’s how it is, right?
Well, yes and no.
Earlier this week, we ran a story about Tom Roy, a former correction officer who fraudulently collected disability payments of nearly $16,000.
Yet, not only did Mr. Roy manage to avoid jail time, but he was also allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains. He had gone on disability for a back injury he suffered breaking up a fight at the jail. Later, when he was asked to come back on light duty, he refused, saying he was still unable to work.
The sheriff’s office moved to fire him, after he was caught climbing ladders, swinging sledgehammers and operating a backhoe as part of his snow removal and construction business. He filed a grievance, which led to him deciding to resign and the sheriff’s office declining to seek reimbursement of the disability money he had been paid.
He was placed on two years' probation and ordered to do 200 hours of community service. If you feel his payment for the crime he committed seem inadequate, you are not alone.
Yet, he is still one of the unfortunate few who have been called to task for white-collar crimes, which according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation cost the United States more than $300 billion annually.
In a piece on why only one top banker, Kareem Serageldin, went to jail for his involvement in the financial crises, Jesse Eisinger, writing for The New York Times Magazine, noted that other bankers had behaved “far worse” than Mr. Serageldin, who was charged with concealing hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse’s mortgage-backed securities portfolio.
“Serageldin’s former employer, for one, had revised its past financial statements to account for $2.7 billion that should have been reported,” Mr. Eisinger wrote.
“Lehman Brothers, AIG, Citigroup, Countrywide and many others had also admitted that they were in much worse shape than they initially allowed. Merrill Lynch, in particular, announced a loss of nearly $8 billion three weeks after claiming it was $4.5 billion.
“Serageldin’s conduct was, in the judge’s words, ‘a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.’ ”
Still, Mr. Serageldin was the only Wall Street banker in the wake of the financial crisis to receive jail time.
Meanwhile, not all hustling of the system is considered a crime.
In 2014, for example, the Government Accountability Office released a report detailing how some 60,000 disabled veterans were triple-dipping by drawing retirement pay, disability benefits from the Veterans Administration and disability checks from Social Security.
Such triple-dipping was illegal until a policy change in 2004. Since then the number of military retirees drawing concurrent benefits from three different federal programs has climbed steadily.
“This report shows that, like other government programs, there is little coordination between these overlapping benefits, which increase cost(s) to taxpayers,” U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican who requested the GAO study, said at the time.
“We should fulfill our promises to the men and women who serve, but we need to streamline these duplicative programs.”
Maybe the Trump administration, whose budget seeks to cut $72 billion from “disability programs,” including Social Security Disability Insurance, will do this streamlining.
It wouldn’t be beyond the president to go after the triple-dipping vets, as a way to keep the spotlight off him and his family seemingly hustling the system.
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