State Employee Fired In Food Stamp Scandal; 1199 Union Worker

Hartford Courant ^

[matt04]

A state employee has been fired in the emergency food stamp fraud scandal after receiving $200 in benefits, officials said Wednesday.

The union worker was terminated for understating her income while applying for the federal benefits, said her attorney, Rich Rochlin. She has been employed as a healthcare worker for the past six years at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown for the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. Rochlin declined to release the worker's name, citing attorney-client privilege and saying he has not been authorized by the client to release her identity.

Rochlin's client, who is single, claimed no dependents on the emergency food stamp form following Tropical Storm Irene. She is among at least 74 state employees who have been under investigation for accepting emergency benefits on food-stamp debit cards that were awarded to Connecticut residents following the freak, pre-Halloween storm that knocked out power in some areas of the state for as many as 13 days.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has repeatedly said that state employees who broke the public trust and broke the rules will be fired and referred for state or federal criminal prosecution.

...

"Our job as a union is to make sure that person has due process,'' Chernoff said Wednesday. "We don't know what the state will do. There have been threats of criminal prosecution.''

The union's role is to protect the worker's employment rights, and she said it is "pretty automatic'' to file a grievance on any firing "to examine the process'' in order to get the worker's job back. The union does not have a role in any criminal prosecution, she said.

[MIchaelTArchangel]

Solution, go to the hospital and ask those entering who did not show up for work in the morning. That’s the simple way to get the name of the crook.