For the last several weeks we have focused on two themes in our posts. The first theme was good old political class insanity and how the politicians in this country always make things worse and we pay for their ineptness in so many ways. The second theme was a continual review of which major city or state government will get to bankruptcy court first given that our top candidates are already in financial death spirals.
We are going to step back from these themes for a while and embark on what is going to be a long list of instances of government and criminal and fraud corruption. Every level of government these days seems to have government programs that are infested with criminal actions that steal hard earned taxpayer dollars for themselves, depriving needy Americans of the resources they need to overcome the problems they face everyday.
There will be no special or organized order as we explore the multitude of capers and criminal actions against government programs. The only thing we can say now is that the almost daily uncovering of new fraud cases and investigations will be disgusting and long.
Before going any further, let’s give credit to Nick Shirley, a 23 year old independent journalist who uncovered billions of dollars worth of government fraud in Minnesota before moving on to California where he has been uncovering similar government corruption and criminal fraud in that state. It seems that his efforts were the catalyst that started an avalanche of criminal schemes stealing taxpayer dollars becoming public knowledge.
1)Let's start off today with a criminal fraud scheme that was busted stealing Covid funds in the D.C. area:
Recently, Ruby Jade Corado, aka Vladimir Orlando Artiga Corado, was sentenced to almost three years in prison.
She pleaded guilty of siphoning off Covid relief funds via a D.C. non-profit she founded and took some of that money to offshore bank accounts.
She got a 33 month prison sentence, two years of supervised release, and has to pay back a whopping $956,225 of taxpayer money she stole.
She had positioned her non-profit as an organization that was supporting homeless LGBTQ youth, survivors of violence, and immigrants.
At one point she had over 50 employees and 6,000 clients.
Her organization got $1.3 million via the Covid Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.
But she skimmed out over $150,000 and sent it to a bank account she had in El Salvador.
The non-profit she had started to help people has been shut down, causing unemployment of her employees and no longer helping those in need. This is probably the most disgusting type of fraud, stealing money intended to help those in society that are in need.
2)Let’s jump out to Arizona as our criminal fraud of government programs appears to be a national disease:
Owners of several Arizona wound graft companies were recently sentenced to significant prison terms.
They were accused of bilking Medicare out of a whopping $1.2 billion in false and fake claims for unnecessary wound grafts.
These scum had ordered these unnecessary grafts on elderly and terminally ill patients, some of the weakest members of society.
One owner was sentenced to over 15 years in prison and her husband got a 14 year prison sentence.
These people hired medically ignorant “sales representatives” to go out in the local community to find elderly Medicare customers in Arizona who had a wound no matter how small.
Many of those identified were terminally ill hospice customers who were then subjected to skin grafts even if that was not the right treatment or was totally unnecessary.
In addition, the strategy was to always perform the largest and most expensive skin graft possible even if that was not the right graft to use, assuming a graft was needed at all.
In just 18 months these operators gathered in over $1.2 billion in Medicare payments with their fraudulent claims.
The Feds confiscated the couple’s assets including $97 million from 28 bank accounts, three life insurance annuities worth over $21 million, four luxury vehicles worth almost a million dollars in total, $367,150 in cash in their home and safe deposit boxes, and over $348,000 in gold and silver bars.
They also have to pay restitution to the tune of over a billion dollars.
The amazing thing about this criminal enterprise and the ineptness of the Federal government, these criminals defrauded Medicare of $1.2 billion in only 18 months. This means that, on average, these folks bilked Medicare of over $2 million a DAY!
How does a computer audit program or a human auditor not notice that $2 million a day was going to wound graft companies in Arizona? Skin grafts!? These folks were not doing brain surgery everyday which might justify $2 million in billing every day but skin grafts? Federal government incompetence to the nth degree.
3)Let’s go back out to California, which is turning out to be fraud central:
A pharmacist, Paul Richard Randall, in Orange County, California apparently bilked the state’s medicaid program, Medi-Cal, out of over $178 million in just 11 months.
He pleaded guilty to submitting false claims for $270 million between May, 2022 and April, 2023.
He billed Medi-Cal for drugs that were either unnecessary or never actually provisioned.
He faces up to 10 years in prison for healthcare fraud.
He was one of 324 people nationwide who have been accused of stealing $14.6 billion accorisng to the 2025 National Health Care Fraud Takedown.
Again, the math is astounding: he fraudulently got $178 million in an 11 month period which means that he was billing Medi-Cal, on average, about $540,000 a DAY! How can a single pharmacy bill over half a million a day for almost a year before someone in government says, “Hey this looks suspicious.”
4)Staying in California for the last of today’s fraud discussion, consider some recent Congressional testimony and how absurdly easy it is to rip off the American taxpayer:
Sheila Clark is the president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association.
She is obviously an expert on hospice care in California.
And her Congressional testimony revealed that at least in California, just about anyone could defraud the system, with her citing fake hospices that were located in such diverse places such as burrito stands and tire stores.
Obviously, hospice and end of life care cannot be dispensed at a burrito stand, as she testified: “How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand in California? How do you put a hospice in a tire store in California? That all had to be vetted through licensure and certification and accreditation.”
This is a thinly veiled accusation against governor Gavin Newsom and the state government oversight ineptness who allowed billions and billions of American taxpayer dollars to be lost at fake hospices at your local burrito stand.
More from Ms. Clark: “You’d be amazed at how many hospices – the door you can walk up to in California and there is nobody there. There is five months worth of mail that you can see stacked up from CMS and nobody’s there. And that passed a survey. How did that happen?”
According to the Congressional committee hearing her testimony: “You heard that right. In Gavin Newsom’s California, a burrito stand masquerading as a hospice care facility was getting accredited and receiving taxpayer dollars.”
Clark correctly implored members of the Committee to also focus on erecting strong barriers to prevent fraud before it starts in addition to going after the current criminal frauds. “We need better enforcement on entry. We need better enforcement at licensure, at the state level. We need it at the certification, the accreditation agencies. We’re not going to convict our way out of this. We have to stop them from entering the system.”
Nick Shirley, independent journalist and the person who started the whole process of identifying fraud in Minnesota before moving to the much bigger fraud centered in California, summed up the situation quite nicely: “We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. It is time to EXPOSE IT ALL and end America’s fraud crisis.”
Pretty disgusting that a burrito stand person can fill out a form in California, declare they are operating a hospice care center at that same location, and the California state bureaucracy starts paying that person Medicaid funds for doing nothing.
Enough fraud for today, from California to Arizona to the nation’s capital, the fraud is immense and disgusting and we are just getting started to discuss this insult to the American taxpayer.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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