Suit Claims County Welfare Fraud Checks Are Illegal

The Legal Aid Society of Orange County filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that unlawful fraud investigation tactics at county welfare offices are preventing homeless people from receiving the public assistance they need.

The lawsuit asks the court to end a county policy of stationing fraud investigators from the district attorney’s office at Social Services Agency offices where the homeless and other people apply for assistance under the county’s general relief program.

“The district attorney’s office has a Neanderthal way of dealing with the homeless: You arrest them,” said Richard Herman, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who works with the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This lawsuit is to take the Gestapo out of the welfare office and let people who are homeless and destitute have an opportunity to put food in the mouths of their children.”

Under the policy being challenged, clerks refer homeless people who have no identification papers to a Special Investigation Unit, where they are questioned and then subjected to extensive police background checks, the lawsuit alleges.

This often has resulted in homeless people being arrested on the spot on warrants arising from minor traffic violations and the like, the attorneys who filed the lawsuit said, and many who need help now are afraid to show up at county welfare offices to ask for it.

“Very often a homeless person only has his car that he sleeps in,” Herman said. “He may get a ticket for a taillight that doesn’t work. He may not be able to pay it. But when he goes to collect general relief to feed his family, they arrest him on the taillight infraction. It’s crazy.”

In a policy statement issued in May, social welfare workers were advised by superiors that an applicant for general relief should be referred to the fraud unit if he or she has made inconsistent statements, if there is reason to believe further investigation is needed or if the person “is homeless and lacks identification.”

The lawsuit, filed in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana on behalf of a homeless woman, identified only as Jane Doe, and of John Dombrink, a board member of Share Our Selves and Irvine Temporary Housing, asks the court to force the county to end the program because it violates state and federal law. Named as defendants are the Board of Supervisors and Larry M. Leaman, director of the county’s Social Services Agency.

The county’s general relief program provides temporary assistance to adults without children and currently is funded at $7.9 million annually. It serves about 1,800 people a month.

One of the problems with assigning investigators to welfare offices is that the practice often punishes the very people the welfare program was designed to aid, the ACLU’s Herman said.

But county officials defended the program Thursday as a well-intentioned attempt to prevent fraud among welfare recipients.

“The purpose of the program is welfare fraud,” said Robert G. Griffith, chief deputy director of the Orange County Social Services Agency. “In the process of the investigation, if law enforcement officers find other illegal violations, they are obligated to follow up. We are not investigating to find out whether they have other legal problems. We are investigating for welfare fraud.

“The Legal Aid people, to make their case sound good, will try to find what appears to be trivial infractions and will ignore the fact that we find a substantial number of serious felons through this process--people with arrest warrants for armed robbery, rape. And many violent, serious criminals have been identified and taken into custody in this program.”

At the same time, Griffith said, his office is “concerned about the problems that our clients have . . . but we don’t want to help cheaters and thieves. The program is designed to make sure we are helping people who truly need it and not people who are trying to cheat the system.”

The policy being challenged was instituted as part of the county’s Early Fraud Prevention Program, which dates back to 1981 and has become a model throughout the state and nation for welfare reform, Griffith said.

Operated jointly by the Social Services Agency and the district attorney’s office, the program is unique, Griffith said, in that it seeks to stop fraud before it happens rather than dealing with it after the fact.

Identification Insufficient

One of the major problems encountered by welfare-fraud investigators, Griffith said, is that many people who come in for assistance don’t have proper identification. That makes it difficult to verify addresses and determine whether welfare applicants are receiving assistance under another name or in another county.

At least six investigators are assigned to each of the Social Service Agency’s four district offices in Santa Ana, Westminster, Costa Mesa and Anaheim. Investigators also are assigned to another office in Santa Ana that serves only refugees.

The department has received a number of complaints over the years that the investigators intimidate people, but usually the clients are at fault, Griffith said.

“In the vast majority, upon further investigation, we find out what the client was telling the community advocate was only half the story. What they didn’t tell was that they were belligerent and uncooperative and cursing out workers and were coming on . . . somewhat violently. We’ve had cases where there have been physical altercations between clients and D.A. people.

“The people we are dealing with are often not the cream of our society. These are people with a variety of personal, social and other problems in their lives--that’s why they are our clients,” Griffith said. “When they come to us, they are often not easy people to deal with.

“They will sometimes go and complain to Legal Aid about the hassles we’re giving them, when actually all we are doing is trying to follow the regulations that require us to verify who they are and if they are eligible for legal aid.

Need for Verification

“If somebody thinks that’s harassment, then we apologize for that. But in the other sense, nobody should expect a government agency is going to hand out money on request without checking.”

The exact number of fraud prosecutions that have resulted from the program was not immediately available, but Griffith said the district attorney’s office handles between 25 and 50 welfare fraud cases each month.

Those who seek to overturn the policy aimed at the homeless maintain that it is fundamentally flawed.

“They think everyone is coming in to commit welfare fraud, when in reality it takes a Herculean effort for many of these people just to make it to the office,” Herman said.

Andrea Zigman, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, said the suit was based partly on Jane Doe’s own story.

According to the lawsuit, Doe, identified only as an indigent and homeless resident of Orange County, tried to apply for general relief and food stamp benefits but was not allowed to complete the application without her husband’s participation.

At the time, the suit says, the husband did not have proper identification and had an outstanding warrant from a ticket he had been unable to pay.

If both of them had shown up to file an application, “the defendants would have run a warrant check on her husband and arrested him,” Zigman said.

The matter was resolved only after a local charity donated money to pay the ticket, thereby clearing the warrant and the way for the woman and her husband to obtain general relief.