Savings Seen in Welfare Fingerprint Program : Fraud: County had $4.5 million less in AFDC payments in month, auditors say. Skeptics question whether numbers will hold up and say legitimate recipients may not be getting benefits.

Fingerprinting welfare recipients has saved Los Angeles County $4.5 million in a single month and could yield as much as $116 million in savings over the next 2 1/2 years, according to an evaluation of an experimental anti-fraud program.

The program, a potential national model, is designed to ensure that applicants for Aid to Families With Dependent Children are not using fake IDs to receive more than one set of benefits a month.

The county spends $160 million each month in AFDC benefits to 900,000 poor people, including children.

So far, the $21-million, three-year program, known as AFIRM, has identified for prosecutors 62 cases of apparent “multiple-aid fraud,” and savings appear to be 50% higher than originally projected, according to an audit by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young.

“Preliminary results show AFIRM will lead to significant benefit savings, potentially as high as $116 million . . . over the remaining 26 months of the pilot,” says a summary of a draft Ernst & Young report, submitted this week to the county Commission for Public Social Services.

Three years ago, the county began fingerprinting recipients in the much smaller General Relief program in a pilot project so successful that it has been copied in Orange, Alameda and San Francisco counties. Last spring, the county received federal approval to try the same thing with AFDC recipients, most of whom live in poor single-parent families or families in which the parents are unemployed or disabled.

Despite the glowing progress report, advocates for the poor remained skeptical and questioned whether legitimate recipients were being denied aid because they had failed to receive notice of the new fingerprinting requirement or were too frightened to comply.

As the county begins fingerprinting all new AFDC applicants, about 325,000 already-approved, adult recipients are being asked by mail to come in and have their index fingers electronically photographed. Those who don’t are automatically dropped from the rolls, and it is those case cancellations that account for a substantial portion of August’s $4.5 million in savings.

“You can’t make the assumption that because someone didn’t come in, they’re cheating,” said Meg Baum of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Some welfare recipients are forced to move so much they do not receive their mail on time, or they live in neighborhoods where mail is often stolen, Baum said. And some may have such a deep distrust of authority that they fear their fingerprints will be shared with American police, immigration officials, or police in their native countries, she added.

“I wonder why we pour so much energy into creating obstacles for people to get enough money to be able to eat and have shelter and take care of their children,” Baum said. “I mean, why are we so self-congratulatory that we’ve saved $4.5 million? If you want to save a whole lot more than that, then why not shut down the whole program?”

Paul Fast, director of research and statistics for the county’s Department of Public Social Services, acknowledged that many of the canceled cases were probably not fraudulent and that it is just a matter of time before legitimate aid recipients are persuaded to get fingerprinted and have their cases reopened.

Once that happens, Fast continued, the savings from the program will be lower than Ernst & Young’s preliminary projections, though still substantial.

Meanwhile, he said, the department’s fraud-investigation unit has randomly selected 120 cancellations to determine why the aid recipients failed to get fingerprinted--if they misunderstood the intent of the program, never received notice, or were indeed afraid to incriminate themselves in multiple-aid fraud.

In touting the benefits of the project this week to social-services commissioners, Fast said it made more sense for the financially strapped county to spend money on tracking cheaters “instead of punishing the innocent with across-the-board cuts.”

Of the $2 billion a year the county spends on AFDC benefits, an estimated 1.5% stems from mutiple-aid fraud, or double- and triple-dipping by people with false identification, said AFIRM Director Lisa Nunez.

Although that is not the most rampant form of welfare fraud, Nunez said, it is among the costliest.

Despite the concerns of Baum and others, Fast said the county has no plans to share fingerprint information with law-enforcement or immigration authorities.

While the number of county residents receiving all types of welfare has doubled in the last five years--from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5, according to Fast--the number of case workers has remained constant, making it harder for them to know their clients personally and spot suspicious cases.

For its report, Ernst & Young surveyed aid recipients and found that only 3% openly resented being fingerprinted, while 95% felt that AFIRM would be effective in preventing multiple case fraud.

“I think recipients feel this will make the (welfare) program more credible,” Fast said.