The Wall Street Journal reports that federal and local investigators plan to arrest 106 people today as part of one of the largest Social Security disability fraud busts in U.S. history. Several dozen arrests had been made early Tuesday. In addition to 102 Social Security disability beneficiaries, authorities are expected to arrest four people who helped them navigate the disability application process and coach them on how to get benefits, the person said. This includes one lawyer, one disability consultant, and two “recruiters,” the person said.
Federal and local prosecutors are expected to allege that scheme led to $24 million in fraudulent disability payments, the person said. A second person familiar with the arrests said the defendants claimed they were “unable to work at any job or leave their homes but had very active lives.”
The arrests come less than six months after federal and local authorities arrested more than 70 people in Puerto Rico on disability fraud charges. A former Social Security employee allegedly helped former employees at a pharmaceutical plant there obtain benefits.
The Social Security Administration is under pressure from Congress to explain what it is doing to tighten up the disability application process following a number of recent scandals. The Social Security Disability Insurance program has close to 11 million beneficiaries, and workers must prove they have physical or mental health problems that prevent them from working. The program has grown so quickly that it could have to begin cutting benefits for all recipients in 2016 unless Congress intervenes.
The New York Times now reports that eighty retired New York City police officers and firefighters are now charged. Scores of those charged in the case essentially stole in plain sight, according to a 205-count indictment and a bail letter, collecting between $30,000 and $50,000 a year based on fabricated claims that they were completely incapacitated by serious psychiatric disorders. Many said that their actions in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were responsible for their psychiatric conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety or depression.
But their Facebook pages and other websites, according to the court papers, tell a starkly different story. Photographs culled from the Internet that show one riding a jet ski and others working at jobs ranging from helicopter pilot to martial arts instructor. One is shown fishing off the coast of Costa Rica and another sitting astride a motorcycle, while another appeared in a television news story selling cannoli at the Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. Prosecutors charge that they were coached by the scheme’s organizers to appear disheveled and disoriented during interviews, in which doctors initially evaluated their disability applications before finding them to be mentally disabled and incapable of any work whatsoever.