SIMI VALLEY : Mother Pleads Guilty in Welfare Benefits Fraud

In one of the county’s largest welfare-fraud cases, a Simi Valley mother has pleaded guilty to illegally collecting nearly $65,000 in government benefits and could face up to three years in state prison, officials say.

Terri Ortega, 27, received welfare checks totaling $55,294, food stamps worth $5,640 and medical benefits of $3,977 during an eight-year period beginning in 1981. Although the programs she used are reserved primarily for non-working single mothers, Ortega told acquaintances that she was married and was working as a nurse’s aide at Granada Hills Community Hospital, using a false last name and Social Security number, said Milton Suttle, chief welfare fraud investigator.

Ortega and Raymond Dascenzo Jr. reported $46,000 in taxable income in 1989, not including the welfare payments.

“These people didn’t need it,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven C. Phillips.

Ortega, who pleaded guilty Friday, will be sentenced on May 8. She could be ordered to repay the county $10,000 if she is sent to prison, and the county will seek to collect the remainder of the money through a civil lawsuit, Suttle said.

“That’s a lot of taxpayers’ money we need to recover,” he said.

Ortega’s attorney is seeking probation for his client, rather than three years in state prison, so her children will not have to be placed in foster care. This would further tax the system, he said, adding that Ortega had offered to repay the money.

“We have somebody who made a mistake and . . . did admit it,” attorney Daniel Ricardo Gonzalez said. “But you have a county and a district attorney’s office who want to make an example of her.”

Ortega told county workers that she was unemployed and listed three different men as the fathers of her three children. However, Dascenzo, who prosecutors say lives with Ortega, is listed on all their birth certificates as the father, Phillips said. The two told acquaintances that they were married, officials said.

Because Ortega used two different names and Social Security numbers, she was able to slip through the county’s system of checking the work records of its welfare applicants, Suttle said. But the district attorney’s child support department encouraged the county to investigate after it failed to find information about the men that she had listed as her children’s fathers.

Dascenzo, 34, is scheduled to be tried May 20 for aiding and abetting welfare fraud. Prosecutors plan to conduct blood tests to determine paternity of the children.