Government Taxpayer Fraud and Corruption:, Part 7: Ohio, Minnesota, Ghana, and Nepal, the International Fleecing Of The American Taxpayer

 We are going to  spend a lot of discussion time in the coming posts to review the massive amount of criminal fraud that has infected government programs for many, many years.  The outstanding investigations recently done,  and still being  done, by independent journalist,  Nick Shirley, has started a cascading identification of the numerous fraud instances at all  levels of government  across the country.

It is unbelievable how many billions of  dollars have been wasted and are currently being wasted and siphoned off by all types  of criminal activities. And while it is amazing how much taxpayer wealth has been wasted and lost, possibly even more amazing is the reality that through the decades the political class and the government  entities they overlook were unable or unwilling to stop the fraud.

1)Let’s start today’s fraud discussion back in Ohio, a place we have discussed a few times before, fraud-wise:

• The U.S.  Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently issued food stamp/SNAP violations to 19 alleged fraud retailers in Ohio.

• These alleged fraudsters were accused of SNAP fraud including swapping SNAP benefits for cash alcohol, tobacco, and other  illegal items.

• For example, a Columbus, Ohio retailer supposedly swapped over $800 in SNAP benefits for $300 in cash and also traded SNAP benefits for a glass bong and bottles of wine.

• Another Columbus retailer accepted SNAP  benefits for beer which is forbidden  under SNAP guidelines.

• A Cleveland retailer swapped over $17,000 in SNAP benefits for cash via undercover Federal agents.

In the big picture, these numbers are tiny. But if this type  of fraud is happening daily at tens of thousands  of retail outlets across the county the fraud could easily get up into the billions of dollars being ripped off from taxpayers.

2)Let’s stay in  Ohio for the latest,  much more robust fraud:

• The FBI recently announced the busting of a criminal enterprise in Ohio which scammed the Medicaid program out of $30 million.

• Those  stolen  dollars were used to  buy high cars including a Bentley, a Maserati, a McLean, and SIX Mercedes.

• Four  alleged  criminals behind the scheme operated bogus behavioral  health companies that billed Medicaid  for therapy and mental health services that supposedly was done with  kids and young adults at camps, church programs and recreational events.

• However, all of the services they submitted for reimbursement never happened.

• When Federal agents moved  in they seized  a total of 14 cars worth about $800,000.

• Three bank accounts with $469,000 were also seized.

• In conjunction  with this announcement in Ohio, the Feds announced that they had identified another fraud  scheme that had siphoned off $57 million off various government  programs that operated, not out of Ohio, but out of Ghana.

• It was also announced that the FBI had developed a “Top Ten Most Wanted  Fraudsters" list to focus on the  big fish ripping  off the American taxpayer.

• An Ohio audit earlier this year estimated that the potential  fraud just in Ohio could range anywhere from $800 million to $44 billion.

The good news  is that  some pretty savvy and  vicious fraudsters have been caught in Ohio.  The bad news is that the  ripping off of government programs now  appears to be  international.

3)But apparently Ghana is not the only foreign entity ripping  off the American  taxpayer:

• According to the Daily Wire, a refugee from Nepal  living in Ohio has been actively advertising and flaunting his new found wealth in  America.

• He created a vanity video that featured himself and showed him giving  his dad a new Cadillac  Escalade for his birthday along with a Mercedes he  bought for his mom, what a great son.

• Another social post showed him drinking  champagne in a private jet with the caption:“Welcome Aboard AIR ROSHAN. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that a kid born in Nepal would one day reach the skies like this.”

• Wow, what a great American  success story except for one small problem: he got rich ripping  off Medicaid and the American taxpayer.

• Apparently he  operated as COO the Centerlight Home Care LLC in Cleveland,  which has no website  but which schemed Ohio’s Medicaid for nearly $17 million.

• His brother operated another  Medicaid funded company  that stole $10 million.

• Other folks in the  state of  Ohio with the  same  surname  beyond his brother billed Medicaid  for $350 million.

The  investigations  into these bogus operations  indicate that a lot of the Medicaid money these folks steal does not  stay in the country, being  sent back to these folks’native  countries. Disgusting.

4)The Department of Health and Human Services  has announced  plans to  launch a new artificial intelligence driven plan to review annual audits of states’ Medicaid  and Medicare efforts. If the audits show incompetence  relative  to  tracking and minimizing fraud of taxpayer  funds  the  Federal government would  withhold  billions of dollars  of funds  from  those  states.

Any state government, college, or other  organizations that received at least a million  dollars from the Federal government would be audited annually  with AI tools. Since about $2 TRILLION of taxpayer money is sent to states via Medicaid  and Medicare, the  stakes are very high when it comes  to curtailing fraud and prosecuting the criminals  stealing those funds.

Current government  estimates  predict that as much as $100 to  $200 billion  are stolen from these two programs annually. And all of these audits are not only necessary but legal under  the 1984 Single Audit Act.

Previous state audits have uncovered fraud schemes. For example, a Minnesota 2024 audit  found that the state had failed miserably for a number of years to conduct in-depth reviews of, as we  know, numerous and extensive fraud  schemes in the state. Thus, the governor, Tom Walz, and others in the state bureaucracy knew  for years there was fraud and did little, if anything, to fix the  stealing of taxpayer wealth.

Ohio, Minnesota,Ghana, and Nepal, an  international  feasting on taxpayer money  that was never controlled by the American political  class.

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The Unthinkable: Government Accounting Processes Force Even Trained Auditors To Give Up

Many, many times and in so many ways we have written how the size of the Federal government has gotten totally out of control, so large and so atrophied:

• Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have gotten so big and so unwieldy from a government bureaucracy perspective that they lose over $200 billion a year to waste and criminal fraud.
• During the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Board was trying to increase the amount of short term Treasury debt that was in the market while the Treasury Department was trying to increase the amount of long term Treasury debt in the market while reducing the amount of short term debt, i.e. the government was so big that two parts of it were trying to do the exact opposite of what each other was doing.
• The tax code has gotten so large and so complicated that the IRS cannot even keep up, admitting that it fails to collect over $380 billion a year from tax evaders.
• The Transportation Safety Administration is so inefficient that it recently purchased almost $200 million worth of airport security equipment that it will never use.
• The Defense Department has gotten so large that one of its own task forces found that the Department buys over $30 billion worth of military parts every year that are either obsolete or unneeded.

The list goes on and on. Our Federal government has morphed into a political Jabba The Hutt, an overbearing, overweight, repressive, inefficient, non-agile character out of the Star Wars movies. This political Jabba wastes taxpayer wealth, destroys freedom and liberties, and never actually resolves any major issues of problems.

Nowhere is this illusion been more vivid than in a recent article from the Huffington Post on January 18, 2013:

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced in the third week in January that it will be unable to complete a complete financial audit of the Federal government since there are serious accounting problems with the Department of Defense.
• At that time, the GAO also identified the Department of Homeland Security as having operational and accounting problems so substantial that it was impossible for investigators to audit it.
• Can you imagine, two major government departments that are so screwed up that even the expert auditors from the GAO, trained professionals that are supposed to bring order to chaos, have thrown up their hands and said they give up, these two departments cannot be audited because of how screwed up they have become.
• And these are not two insignificant entities: the article states that the Department of Defense has a net annual cost of $799.1 billion and the Department of Homeland Security has a net cost of $48.7 billion.
• If you add these two numbers up and divide the total by the 115 million households in the U.S., you end up with over $7,300 per household in taxes that that the Federal government cannot account for every year.
• This is an atrocious insult to every American taxpayer who pays their fair share of taxes to a government that then proceeds to misappropriate, misspend, and outright lose those taxes at a rate of $7,300 per household.
• This was the official GAO reasons of why they could not complete their audit: "The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2012 consolidated financial statements of the federal government because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations. As was the case in 2011, the main obstacles to a GAO opinion on the accrual-based consolidated financial statements were: Serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable. The federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies. The federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements."

I love the phrase, “as was the case in 2011,” in other words, this type of screwup happens every year. The other adjectives used to describe the situation are also quite damning: serious problems, unsuitable, ineffective, control weaknesses, limitations, uncertainties, etc. What a disgrace.

How much corruption, criminal fraud, outright wasteful spending is going on in these two departments? We may never know because of how messed up the government and the political class that should be overseeing these operations have allowed the political Jabba The Hutt to grow out of control.

But not only are the actual accounting and audit processes out of whack, the process for fixing them are also a train wreck, according to the article:

• A GAO source told the Huffington Post writer that Pentagon meetings with the auditors were often canceled at the last minute because the Pentagon could not get its paperwork and financial statements compiled on time.
• Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States and head of the GAO, tried to throw the Pentagon a bone/compliment and recognize the improvements in accounting practices made over time but since the Defense Department’s accounting processes and results are still unaudtiable, how much improvement really could have been made?
• The GAO report said that the Pentagon was working on a way to get its financial statements to a point where they could actually be audited, "following years of unsuccessful financial improvements." How can an “improvement” be “unsuccessful?” Makes no sense.
• The target is to have valid financial statements available by September, 2017. However, in October 2011, the goal was to have audit-readiness by fiscal year 2014 so good luck hitting that 2017 date.
• And in reality, that 2017 date is really unacceptable. That would mean that for four more years, over $800 billion a year would be a mystery as far as how it was being spent and how much of it was being wasted.
• The agency slammed the Pentagon for its financial readiness, saying that recent work has "raised concerns" about the Pentagon's ability to implement a valid accounting process and plan.

Thus, the financial statements are a farce, the past improvements to remedy the statements and accounting processes have been a farce, and the ability to fix the processes going forward look like they will also be a farce. I have never heard of any business, any corporation, any non-profit organization, any government agency, or any human endeavor being so screwed up that it could not even be audited by trained professional to find out how screwed up it was. Until now, that is.

Several steps from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government” need to be implemented right away to start to address and fix this insult to the American taxpayer:

1. Step 46 would impose very strict accounting and auditing processes on every single Federal government entity along the lines of the Sarbannes-Oxley legislation that is imposed on private businesses and companies. If non-government entities have to live under and obey strict, generally accepted accounting rules and guidelines, there is no reason why government entities should be exempted from those same rules. Maybe if Sarbannes-Oxley had been in place all along we would not annual have over $800 billion at risk.
2. Step 34 establishes a process to remove Congressional members from their committee posts if their committees fall down on the jobs they are supposed to be doing. In this case, any Congressional member who allowed the Defense Department budgeting and accounting process to get this screwed up needs to be removed form those committees immediately. Given how massive this screwup is, they probably should also be drummed out of office.
3. Step 1 would reduce Federal government spending 10% a year for five years across the board. Possibly the only way to get the political Jabba under control is to starve it down to a smaller, more manageable entity that could actually be audited.

Is there any wonder why we have a $16.4 TRILLION national debt when two large government departments are so big and so out of control that an audit is not only difficult, it is impossible?

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