Like the flood waters that swallowed New Orleans in 2005, reports of fraud just keep coming out of Katrina’s vast disaster area.
The latest evidence of bad people acting in bad faith comes from the Associated Press, which reported this week that FEMA pumped $309 million into 70,000 households that didn’t deserve it. In fact, some of these “households” didn’t have houses before the storm. An AP analysis reveals that owners of at least 162,750 homes that never existed “may have received a total of $1 billion in improper or illegal payments.”
According to AP, the Justice Department has prosecuted 400 people for fraud, recouping only $18 million so far. In one case, a woman who lived in Texas was able to bilk the government for $65,000 in post-Katrina aid. She has since been caught, jailed and ordered to repay the government $100 per month for the next 70 years.
Sadly, there’s more bad news to tell: A year after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the Government Accounting Office reported that fraud cost US taxpayers as much as $1 billion of the $6.3 billion distributed by FEMA in the wake of the killer hurricanes. As detailed in an analysis by Government Executive magazine, the chaos of the disaster area, the pressure to respond quickly, and the desire of well-meaning government officials to give aid recipients the benefit of the doubt contributed to the mega-fraud:
One individual who scammed $139,000 from FEMA used 13 Social Security numbers and 13 different addresses, eight of which were bogus or publicly owned.
Government Executive also reported that at least a thousand claims were traced back to names and Social Security numbers of people in prisons that were not affected by the storms.
Plus, some of the purchases made with FEMA’s disaster debit cards had nothing to do with disaster assistance at all—jewelry, football tickets, pornographic videos, even visits to a strip club were all traced to disaster debit cards that FEMA handed out in good faith and the American people supplied with their hard-earned tax dollars.
It’s sad to think that Katrina may end up costing us far more than lives and treasure–it may end up permanently deforming our capacity and our desire to help our neighbors.
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