Welfare for the dead

Some unusual fireworks erupted at the State House last week that are guaranteed to keep popping this week and beyond.

State Auditor Suzanne Bump said her office discovered 1,164 cases where welfare benefits worth nearly $2.4 million continued to go to enrollees after they were reported deceased or to recipients using a dead person’s Social Security Number.

The state attorney general quickly said she is looking into it, and conservative lawmakers reacted forcefully at a press conference.

Rep. Shauna O’Connell (R-Taunton) said the system was “infested with abuse” and Rep. James Lyons (R-Andover) said taxpayers are being forced to subsidize people who defraud the system.

The sole Democrat to attend the press conference, Rep. James Miceli of Wilmington, called the state’s welfare system a “disaster.”

Department of Transitional Assistance Interim Commissioner Stacey Monahan defended the administration’s management of welfare programs and said there is no amount of fraud and abuse she will tolerate.

The next day, Democratic Rep. Tom Conroy of Wayland became the first legislator to jump to the administration’s defense, and he accused the auditor of not providing the department enough information about the audit for the DTA to respond.

Then the auditor’s office accused the representative of not having read the complete report.

Gov. Deval Patrick then strongly defended his administration’s handling of public assistance and said in nine out of 10 cases, the auditor’s report was wrong.

To cap off a raucous week, both the Senate president and House speaker reiterated their calls for welfare reform, with the keystone of any plan the requirement that recipients’ photos be placed on electronic benefits cards.

Reaction to audit is extraordinary

This reaction is certainly out of the ordinary for state audits, which are usually issued and soon forgotten.

But this issue sets the blood boiling for many elected officials, often conservatives, who have been claiming for years that welfare recipients have been cheating the system.

Everyone remembers former President Ronald Reagan raging about “welfare queens,” and when conservative candidates want to show how tough they are, they commonly launch an attack on “lazy” people who should be working for a living, instead of sitting at home collecting benefits provided by the taxpayers.

Nevermind that welfare has been reformed at both the state and federal level over the years and rules have been tightened significantly, with a smaller lifetime cap on benefits and new work or education requirements for almost all recipients.

Never mind that even if the audit’s findings are completely accurate, the $2.4 million in fraudulently obtained benefits is minuscule in a Massachusetts department that provides $1.7 billion in state and federal benefits annually.

Never mind that there’s plenty of fraud by doctors and others who provide services to low-income folks.

Granted, any amount of fraud is a problem, and reforming the state welfare system again is something that needs to be done, especially in light of the audit report, assuming its accuracy can be confirmed.

But the biggest problem is we always find it so easy to vilify poor people, most of whom are basically honest and simply struggling to make ends meet.

Maybe the bigger transgression here is there are so many relatively well-off officials and others so quick to dump on the less fortunate, when in most circumstances their only crime is being poor.

Posted by Bruce Garlow on June 6, 2013. Filed under Berkshire Beacon Hill Spotlight,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry