Fraud Charged to Worker at Welfare Office : Crime: An employee in Chula Vista is arrested and accused of embezzling $17,000 over two years.

A San Diego County welfare employee was arrested Thursday and charged with embezzling more than $17,000 over two years by using existing cases to hide checks that she mailed to herself.

Elizabeth Carrillo, 30, was arrested while at work at the Chula Vista welfare office, and charged with 16 felony counts of embezzling $17,479 since June, 1990, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Boles. Investigators traced 41 phony checks that Carrillo illegally authorized for herself and her mother, Boles said.

Carrillo’s mother, who was not identified, was not involved in the scheme and was not charged, officials said. Carrillo used her maiden name of Castillon when making out the phony checks to herself, and made out the other checks in her mother’s name, Boles said.

Boles said Carrillo forged her mother’s name on the checks and deposited them in a local bank. The checks mailed out in Carrillo’s maiden name were cashed at liquor stores and markets near her Chula Vista home, Boles said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services said Carrillo has been a welfare employee since May, 1988 and earns between $18,678 and $23,857 per year. She was employed as a benefits analyst and decided who qualified for welfare benefits.

Carrillo, a single parent with three children, was booked at Las Colinas Jail and held on $25,000 bail. Boles said that officials decided to arrest Carrillo at work because they wanted to send a clear signal to other employees that corruption will not be tolerated.

According to Boles, the phony checks that Carrillo authorized ranged in amount from $50 to $800. Typically, she would authorize supplemental checks at the middle of the month to existing welfare cases, he said.

But, instead of sending the checks to the legitimate welfare clients, she would mail them to her home, prosecutors said. Using an existing case as the basis for the payment, Carrillo would change the name and address of the payee just for the supplemental checks, officials said.

At the beginning of the month, the regular welfare payments were sent to the families whose cases Carrillo used to carry out the fraud, Boles said. Cecil Steppe, acting director of social services, said that none of the families whose cases were used by Carrillo were affected by the alleged scheme.

Steppe said the illegal payments were detected by a new computerized safeguard system that “red flags possible fraud” in cases handled by employees. He said routine review of Carrillo’s caseload “detected some aberrations in the work she was performing.”

Carrillo was the sixth employee arrested for fraud in the past nine months. Last October, 20 people led by five welfare employees, were charged with embezzling as much as $1 million from the county. Most of those charged have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

In April, the county grand jury released a report detailing what the panel said was widespread corruption and fraud in the social services department. The eight-month grand jury investigation estimated that employee and welfare recipient fraud costs the county up to $70 million annually.

The jury report found that some welfare recipients are receiving overpayments, and that some employees stole welfare funds by creating phony welfare cases. The report said that some internal investigations of employee corruption and illegal welfare payments had been covered up.

Richard W. Jacobsen was forced to step down as social services director after the grand jury report.

Citizens who have information about welfare fraud are urged to call a toll-free fraud hot line at 800-421-2252.