THE PATRICK RECORD
FACT: FEWER PEOPLE ON WELFARE NOW THAN UNDER BAKER
“The number of recipients is down from over 110,000 in the 1990s to 50,000 now, even in the midst of the worst national economy in generations.” (Herald, 10/11/10)
FACT: PATRICK-MURRAY ADMINISTRATION HAS COLLECTED MILLIONS IN FRAUD RECOVERY
In 2008, the Department of Transitional Assistance created a Program Integrity Unit within the Department to prevent and combat welfare fraud through prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution. In FY10 alone, DTA collected over $4 million in repayments from present and former clients as a result of both intentional and unintentional program violations.
FACT: PATRICK-ADMINISTRATION HAS ADVOCATED AND SUPPORTED EFFORTS TO CRIMINALIZE PURCHASES OF ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO WITH EBT CASH
The Patrick-Murray Administration has been clear that it supports language in the budget to make the purchase of alcohol and tobacco with EBT cash assistance a criminal offense for both the individual and the vendor. The language contained a technical error that would have made it unenforceable. It has since been corrected and returned to the Legislature for approval.
THE BAKER RECORD
FACT: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF WELFARE FRAUD CASES LANGUISHED FOR YEARS ON BAKER’S WATCH
Boston Globe: “State Auditor Joseph DeNucci charged yesterday that years of mismanagement at the state Bureau of Investigations created a chronic case backlog that hobbled Massachusetts’ effort to root out welfare fraud. DeNucci said that in the spring of 1995, when he launched his audit, more than one-third of the agency’s 60,000 open cases had been languishing four years or more. More than 5,500 had been pending for more than ten years. In addition, the individual caseloads of the bureau’s 105 investigators varied widely, from a low of 43 cases to a high of 1,788 cases”. (Boston Globe, 1/7/97)
FACT: UNDER BAKER’S WATCH, STATE’S WELFARE FRAUD SQUAD IN DISSARAY
Boston Herald: “Gov. William F. Weld’s welfare-abuse crackdown was reeling yesterday as the head of the elitefraud squad quit, the unit faced a performance review and its chief investigator was sent home under a cloud. Although the administration insists the much-publicized effort to root out fraud and waste is on track, it must confront three major headaches: Officials confirmed that the Bureau of Special Investigations, which falls under the state Department of Public Safety, is the subject of an internal management review. It is focusing on whether the agency has fallen short of performance goals in prosecuting welfare fraud and other types of public assistance abuses. “There is a problem with a lack of referrals for prosecution,” said one law enforcement source. “There is a backlog of fraud cases. Cases are not being followed up on.” Glen P. Fealy, head of state Bureau of Special Investigations, abruptly and without apparent reason announced his resignation Monday. The chief welfare fraud investigator, John Comerford, has been placed on administrative leave amid charges he pressured an employee for a cut-rate deal on a home remodeling job.”(Boston Herald, 6/12/96)
FACT: BAKER’S TOP WELFARE FRAUD INVESTIGATOR WAS CAUGHT IN NEPOTISM SCHEME
Weld’s top welfare fraud investigator was caught in nepotism scheme while Baker in charge of Health and Human Services. In 1994, in an apparent attempt to work around state nepotism rules, a top Department of Industrial Accidents official and the chief investigator of Weld’s welfare fraud unit both hired each other’s sons – within a month of each other. The chairwoman of an all-volunteer DIA board was paid more than $ 100,000 in three years to serve as liaison to the board – that is, to herself. (Boston Globe, 10/24/96)
FACT: UNDER BAKER/WELD, SPECIAL PANEL TO TRACK WELFARE FRAUD IN STATE PROGRAMS FAILS TO HOLD ONE SINGLE MEETING
Boston Herald: “Despite repeated claims by Gov. William F. Weld that cleaning up welfare is his top priority, a special state board that tracks fraud in aid programs has not held even a single meeting in nearly three years. Officials confirmed yesterday the Fraudulent Claims Commission, set up by state law specifically to target public assistance program fraud, held its last meeting in October 1993. The panel failed to meet despite pleas from one top state official who said meetings were needed and members, at the least, should be getting periodic status reports on fraud combat efforts.That official wrote memos in 1994 and 1995 asking that the claims commission be put back into action. (Boston Herald, 6/13/96)
FACT: UNDER BAKER/WELD, ANTI-FRAUD UNIT DISBANDED FOLLOWING BUNGLED CRACKDOWN ON CRIMINALS COLLECTING WELFARE
Boston Globe: “Welfare fraud investigators have been accused of squandering taxpayer money on hotel stays during a roundup last summer of 559 violent fugitives who were collecting welfare. Public Safety Commissioner Winthrop Farwell, who oversees the Bureau of Special Investigations, has refused to reimburse the investigators for $ 6,000 worth of travel expenses, asserting it was unnecessary for them to accompany police who made the arrests. The six investigators were part of a newly formed warrant team at the Bureau of Special Investigations, a small state agency that investigates welfare fraud.After reviewing the team’s expenses and responsibilities in the fugitive roundup, Farwell ordered the warrant unit disbanded, and the six have since resumed their other investigative duties.” (Boston Globe, 11/29/97)
I’m shocked, just SHOCKED, that the GOP candidate for governor is lying.
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p>Again.
…mistruths, and misleading statements in Baker’s ads deserves its own diary, and preferably a TV expose.
20 years ago, folks got welfare checks. They cashed them, and purchased whatever they wanted — food, shelter, clothing, cigarettes, booze, televisions.
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p>Nowadays, folks get welfare ATM cards. They cash them, and purchased whatever they want — food, shelter, clothing, cigarettes, booze, televisions.
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p>What’s the big deal? Which is to say, why now?
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p>P.S. If you’re opposed to welfare, you should like folks being able to buy lotto tickets — they’re just giving the money back to the gov’t. Where’s the beef with that?
If you were on food stamps, when you went to the checkout and had change, you didn’t get money. You got blue, yellow, green and red poker chips in coin deniminations. So you couldn’t mis-spend the largesse. That fell through after stores rebelled against having a double drawer of ‘change’. Some supermarkets even refused to take food stamps, as they were too big a hassle.
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p>What next? Make sure that the cards aren’t just avoiding the WRONG thing, but also buying the RIGHT things? Heinz instead of Hunts? Green electricity instead of fossil fuel? Condoms instead of…never mind..
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p>But really – how far do they intend to go?
It certainly seems like Baker was in a great position to address this issue of inappropriate purchases, with Weld, when they originated the idea back in the ’90’s. Nip it in the bud, so to speak.
And Citibank got $200 million to do what exactly? Sounds like we overpaid the private-sector middleman a bit, but whatever.
Excellent post. Collective memory is Baker’s worst enemy- unfortunately you can’t be an insider and an outsider at the same time.
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p>How can the vendor tell if the cash for booze or cigarettes is EBT cash?
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p>Clearly, if the guy swipes the EBT card then it’s EBT cash. Got it.
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p>But if they get the cash from the ATM in the store is it a crime? How about the ATM outside the store? A block from the store?
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p>Maybe there’s a time limit. Hold the ATM cash for 10 or 15 minutes and it’s magically no longer EBT cash.
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p>Maybe if the vendor knows the customer is on public assistance he should just assume he’s using EBT cash and refuse to sell booze to the customer?
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p>The Patrick Administration: “Fungible. We don’t know what that means!”
The store owner instructs his customers how to commit fraud.
http://news.bostonherald.com/n…
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I see it all the time. The same few people come in, have multiple ebt cards, use the ATM in the store, use the cash wipe out our Marlboro’s. We’ve also seen people who own convenience stores in the area use multiple EBT cards to buy stuff around the store in bulk to stock up their store’s supply of whichever product they target. There is so much abuse all around on the system, not just welfare queens – this program has to tighten up.
He’s the one who brought it up, right?
I find it disgusting. Not that recipients are spending the money inappropriately, that’s a given, but that the Baker campaign is dragging up the stereotypical, kneejerk, welfare queen attack line for this story. It’s just so typical. Poster Farnkoff said correctly that Baker, in his inside state government life, had the position, authority, and governors’ ears to do something about this. Where was he? Now he wants to be Mr self righteous and pontificate about it. Excuse me, but that ship has already sailed, and he missed the boat. As far as recipients’ spending, it benefits the economy regardless of whether the money is spent on food and clothing, or cigarettes and liquor, however, it’s inappropriate because the money should be spent of food, clothing, and shelter, the real necessities of life.
Remember the Reagan welfare-queens-driving-Cadillacs meme? They’re rehashing this crap again? Oy.
when you bring folks from out of town (or maybe not, most of these guys have been kicking around Massachusetts for 20 years).
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p>The Baker campaign seems to be following an old textbook on how to run a Republican campaign. To some extent, every major candidate is a puppet of his organization, but you shouldn’t be able to see the strings.
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p>Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get the feeling that the Baker campaign understands the Massachusetts electorate or exactly how Scott Brown managed to get elected. The Tea Party may have come out for Brown, but the unenrolled voters that cast their votes against Coakley were not as far to the right as they are in different parts of the country. Right-wing wackos don’t have much of a state-wide chance in Massachusetts.
A picture (or data) says a thousand words. Click to enlarge.
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Thanks af
because your comment needs work. First, I don’t suppose Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill had anything to do with the caseloads. Second, your little picture doesn’t begin to address the tawdry record of Republican failure to do anything about welfare fraud under Baker’s watch.
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p>So, I’d say “needs work” is a fair rating.
…by raising the caseload numbers in the first place, presumably to suggest that he’s tougher than Baker on welfare.
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p>Of course Baker is trying to find a common enemy to unite his supporters. (“It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people…, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” –Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.) And who better than welfare recipients, or immigrants, or — best of all — immigrants receiving welfare benefits, to play that role.
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p>But more disappointing to me, because my expectations are higher, and especially as I am being urged to close the enthusiasm gap, is Patrick’s silence today on the more fundamental issue: the need to reduce childhood poverty, on which he in fact has a far better record than Baker.
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p>I’ve donated to the Patrick campaign; I’ll vote for him and I’ll encourage others to do so. But again I’m reminded of a recent comment by Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect.
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The welfare reforms under the contract with america that were based on Baker and Weld’s welfare reforms years prior.
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p>The Gingrich/Clinton welfare reform act became law on August 22, 1996. Weld and Baker had reduced the welfare caseload by close to 26,000 cases from the time Baker became HHS secretary to when the federal law was enacted. The pace of the drop in Massachusetts cases was the same before the Federal law as it was after it.
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p>Baker and Weld were out front on this. Maybe they were hyper focused on fixing the systemic problems first and the smaller fraud areas second. No?
Clinton’s we;fare reform came in 1996, and could account for only the last bit of that slope, and it appears that the “declining number of cases” is a big anti-Weld and Baker point above. The chart effective debunks at least that portion of the claim in the Patrick campaign fact-check.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Multiple EBT cards aside, how do you prevent someone who receives welfare from spending the money foolishly? Aside from assigning a case worker to trail and approve all purchases for every recipient? And how do you come up with a consensus of what should be allowable spending and what should not? Some things are obvious, like lottery tickets, but why shouldn’t someone who receives welfare be able to drink a beer every so often?
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p>The whole plan seems awfully big-government to me too. How’d you like your employer going through all your purchases to determine if you should get a raise or not?
My company provides it’s employees with HRA cards (MasterCard) which only can be used on health care expenditures. The charges won’t go through if the product isn’t the proper class. This system has been working for at least 3 or 4 years. Why the state doesn’t do it, probably because they don’t care.
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It’s because if the state starts doing that, the Democrats will lose the welfare queen vote. See, this is all part of a Democratic conspiracy to steal the election from real hard-working Republican-Americans.
The article isn’t about food stamps, it’s about welfare benefits, which are paid in cash. How do you prevent people from spending their cash foolishly?
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p>What’s next? Auditing how people on unemployment spend their checks? Social Security?
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p>And again, how do you come to a consensus as to what is allowable? Half the people complain that people on food stamps are fat, and the other half complain when they see people spending money on “expensive” yet healthier food like fresh fruits and meats.
And the ugly kind, not the ‘morning in America.’
Baker’s welfare attack is getting mileage though. All I hear on the local radio news reports is “Baker proposes a 5-year cap on welfare benefits (which we already have) and Baker wants to prohibit the use of EBT cards to buy lottery tickets and alcohol”.
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p>That particular framing makes sense to everyone — after all, who wants to see people gambling away their welfare or hanging on welfare generation after generation?
… as does Patrick, as the campaign’s release made clear.
The news cycle in Western MA did not mention Patrick. It only mentioned that Baker wanted to prohibit this, so in effect, Baker won that news cycle.
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p>It’s really just a false issue, though, because not only do I think that people who really want to use their welfare money to buy lottery tickets will just withdraw the cash at an ATM, I doubt that the technology is at the right place because most convenience store debit machines are after-market add-ons, they accept a single total, and do not receive a list of the items purchased. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I really don’t think those machines can differentiate between products.
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p>So the effect may be prohibition of EBT cards at convenience stores in general, and that would be bad public policy, because does anyone realize that mainstream grocery stores refuse to locate in poor urban areas? Those areas are mainly serviced by convenience stores (and, oddly, CVS). We’ll go back to poor people carrying lots of cash, more robberies, etc. (I’ve heard that illegal immigrants are already targeted for robbery because the criminals know they won’t report this to the police, and of course, there was the recent case in Springfield where the police robbed some illegal immigrants of their cash)
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p>In fact, I would bet that more money is “wasted” on the higher prices charged to people in poor urban areas versus money spent on lottery tickets. I guess that isn’t headline material though — I guess it would be “big bad government control” if we talk about businesses gouging customers. Let’s talk about controlling what people on welfare can and can’t buy instead.
Springfield already has a Wal-Mart, though not a super-center (Chicopee, the city next door, has one of those).
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p>The main problem with urban areas is that many people don’t have access to a car, which makes grocery shopping very difficult — think about how many groceries you buy, and then picture trying to get that onto a bus.
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p>We have two major brand grocery stories in this area (nice oligopoly, huh?) — Stop & Shop and Big Y (based in Springfield). In the latest round of grocery store consolidations, Food Mart went out of business and Big Y bought their locations. They refused to reopen one of the stores as a Big Y — it was in a poor urban neighborhood. The next closest Big Y was 2 miles away — which sounds close until you realize that Big Y has other stores within 1 mile of each other. What’s worse is that Big Y has been closing stores in dense urban (yet poor) neighborhoods and opening them in sparsely populated suburban (yet wealthy) neighborhoods. So a location with 40,000 people in a 1-mile radius (with no competition) is not worth it for them, but a location with 8,000 people in a 1-mile radius (plus competition from other stores) is, because those 8,000 people are making 5x the income.
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p>A generic “discount” store went into the former Food Mart location, with poorer selection and higher prices.
All of which amounts to a “food desert” served primarily by convenience stores, which sell junk food at high prices.
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p>The stores can’t really control the transportation. Cities can help: Worcester has expanded bus service to a new, enormous Wal-Mart near Rte 146. I don’t know if this service is much used, but it seems to be, and one can buy groceries there MUCH more cheaply than at the convenience stores. (I have found that my grocery bill can run more than $100/week less there, compared to Shaws, Stop&Shop, or Big Y; the difference from 7 Eleven and White Hen Pantry must be even more)
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p>Cities can also help by alleviating concerns with security: open a police station in the same plaza as the new store.