Welfare Applicants to Receive Visits at Home

Embarrassed by a scathing grand jury report that alleged widespread welfare fraud in Los Angeles County, officials this week began testing a controversial program that will send caseworkers to homes of new welfare applicants for surprise visits.

The plan provoked an immediate outcry from social welfare advocates, who tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to get a Superior Court judge to block it. Representatives of several legal aid groups, vowing further legal challenges, said the surprise visits are overly intrusive and amount to illegal searches.

The home visits represent a fundamental shift in how people applying for welfare benefits in Los Angeles County are treated. The county previously conducted such visits only if they were necessary to determine eligibility or if something in an application raised a red flag. Now, even those not suspected of deception will get a visit.

The home calls will proceed from four of the county’s 23 district welfare offices--Exposition Park, Lancaster, Belvedere (in East Los Angeles) and the east San Fernando Valley--for six months and then could expand countywide.

Specially trained caseworkers will drop by unannounced at the homes of all applicants who may be eligible for cash benefits to see if family composition and income match the information given on applications. Workers will look into rooms but not into drawers or closets, officials said.

Although the visits are designed mainly to uncover fraud, the caseworkers also will assess the applicant’s need for services such as child care, mental health and drug abuse programs, domestic violence assistance and education or training.

County officials defended the project and said it would not delay benefits for those who qualify.

“We do not want to scare away any eligible clients; that’s a major concern of ours,” said Lisa Nunez, a program manager for the Department of Public Social Services.

Nunez said the county routinely made home calls many years ago but abandoned the practice except in cases of suspected fraud because it became too costly. Orange, Ventura and Imperial counties make home calls, but only in response to applications that have been flagged for possible fraud. In California, only San Diego County has a blanket program, using district attorney’s investigators to visit all potentially eligible applicants.

Los Angeles County’s action follows a damning audit issued in June by the grand jury, which said fraud committed by welfare recipients and employees costs the public as much as $500 million annually. The audit cited numerous deficiencies at welfare offices, including overpayments to recipients, enormous backlogs of fraud cases and clerical mistakes.

Officials were also stung by a recent segment of TV’s “20/20,” which featured several Los Angeles County families living luxuriously while on welfare.

Although department Director Lynn Bayer vehemently disputed some of the grand jury’s findings--especially the $500 million loss estimate--she agreed with many of the recommendations and incorporated them into a more comprehensive anti-fraud plan that includes the home visits.

The department received more money to hire additional staff for the project, but officials could not estimate whether home visits would ultimately prove to be cost-effective.

Social welfare advocates argue that the county can weed out fraud by hiring more workers to investigate the backlog of cases already on file. Robert D. Newman, an attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, said that many eligible applicants--particularly immigrants and victims of domestic violence--will be fearful of applying for aid because of the home visits.

“It’s a demeaning and humiliating experience,” said Newman, whose group was one of four that petitioned for, but failed to win, an emergency restraining order to block the visits. “We all recognize we have the privacy of our homes. If I showed up at your home and said I wanted to look in all the rooms, would you let me in?”