I personally have seen people sort through a selection of 5 or 6 EBT cards to make sure they picked the right one to match their ID to but at least $1000.00 worth of goods using 4 different cards at Wal Mart at 12:05 AM the day funds transferred
Outside I noticed they were driving a bright new and shiny 2011 Ford Excursion full size SUV 4X4 totally optioned out with leather interior and expensive high end mag wheels and tires - wearing Sonora, Mexico license plates.
I'd call that the Super Bowl of gaming the system, or at least the Final Four
No doubt.
Real money is still up the chain of command, though. As I posted earlier, I do some work for an auditing firm. They rarely do any work with the government. Why? With billion dollar budgets at the state level, and trillion dollar budgets at the federal level, certainly there's money there to be found, I thought.
Well, one of the auditors explained it to me. Lets say that an auditor finds a claim (be it a duplicate payment, over payment, or what have you). In order to collect, some head hoo-ha at the government agency being worked with needs to give the audit firm the "OK" to go and get the money. The audit firm collects the money, takes a skim (er, 'commission') and returns the balance to the agency.
For the first 6 months or so in the fiscal year, approvals are easy to get. For the rest of the time, not so much. Because, if the money is collected, then the head hoo-ha must spend the money before the end of the year, or it's trimmed from their budget. Ergo, they don't want to find any extra money that they can't get rid of, and if they have any extra, they just spend it anyway. It's an absolutely illogical and self-defeating position of punishing success and rewarding failure.
With no continuous stream of approvals to collect on (and thus no revenue), many good audit firms are loathe to work gov't contracts. So, we have an uneviable status quo of people screwing up and/or ripping the government off, the people in charge don't care and/or won't do anything, and there's little to no outside supervison of the entire process. Have a thought for that, the next time you read a newspaper article about the pity of it all, government agency so-and-so is losing funding and will need to reduce the amount of blah, blah, blah....
So....$1000 of goods fraudulently obtained, while abhorrent, is peanuts. Especially when you think about the number of government-run schools, and local, county, state, and federal government agencies that there are, all operating under this premise that I've just outlined. :-)
/rant over. I'll step off my soapbox.
16 million. And that's just what they bothered to find.