Welfare Study Attacked as Inaccurate

The accuracy of a state study showing dramatic rates of welfare fraud in Orange County came under attack Wednesday by local advocates for the poor, who claimed that officials used questionable reporting tactics to identify “cheaters.”

But authorities were not budging from results of the study, which found fraud in 27% of 500 child welfare cases reviewed in Orange County, a trend that officials expect to find in future probes throughout the state using the local investigation as a model.

“People who have not read this report are already playing games with it,” said County Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, who helped initiate the review. “All the rocks being thrown at this thing are going to hit a block wall. No glass will be broken here.”

Stanton and Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi, whose special investigations unit reviewed the suspect cases, found themselves defending the report only minutes after its release at a Hall of Administration news conference.

“The bottom line,” said Capizzi, “is that we have people who are frauds, and they are cheats, and they are taking advantage of the system.”

The afternoon briefing was also attended by Nancy Rimsha, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, who sharply criticized officials for using “broad definitions” to classify abuse and inflate their findings.

“These big numbers need a lot more scrutiny,” Rimsha said, adding that the complex bureaucracy of the state welfare system is susceptible to error and inefficiencies.

Scott Wylie, executive director of Orange County’s Public Law Center, said the rate of abuse revealed in the study appeared too high, especially since Southern California’s lagging economy has produced an increasingly needy population.

“I don’t like to see people involved in fraud,” Wylie said, “but sometimes we spend so much time and effort investigating programs when we could be using the same money to see that they run more efficiently.”

But Stanton said the investigation, which cost $168,000, would lead to a savings of $1.2 million over three years.

“People may argue and bicker about the confidence level of this report,” Stanton said. “But we got cases off the welfare roles. You can’t prevent welfare fraud unless you know where it occurs.”

In well over half the cases in which fraud was found, the abuse involved failure by adult care-givers to report outside income that made children ineligible for assistance under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

Of the 135 cases in which violations were detected, recipients in 124 cases had their welfare payments reduced or taken away, officials said. So far, six cases have been referred for possible criminal action, and Capizzi said it was possible that more would be added to the list for criminal prosecution.

“We had one welfare client tell an investigator that it was government’s obligation to support children,” Capizzi said. “The benefit of a project like this is that it says that kind of thinking is just dead wrong. It’s not government’s obligation to support children.”

The state-sponsored study focused on cases in which children were listed as the only beneficiaries. Michael Genest, deputy director of the California Department of Social Services, said Orange County was selected for the investigation because of its large number of new welfare cases--38% of the total--involving “child-only” payments.

In California, there are various reasons why parents or guardians are ineligible to receive welfare assistance while their children or dependents can receive such aid. The most common reason is that the children were born in the United States of illegal immigrant parents and are entitled to the benefits as citizens, while their parents are not.

The number of children in a family dictates the monthly welfare payments, which range from $299 for one-child families to a maximum of $924 for a family with five or more children.

“This money should be set aside for the people who really need it,” Stanton said. “But this report found that it is being drained away.”

Critics, however, said more attention should be paid to how the study was conducted and its potential for error.

“For the most part, (welfare recipients) are people who are easily intimidated,” Rimsha said. “Investigators scare these people to death. Many are non-English-speaking and elect to close their cases rather than challenge investigators’ questions.”