Massachusetts state auditor, Suzanne Bump reported on welfare scams: Welfare payments issued to recipients long after they were listed as dead..... Multiple recipients using one Social Security number – and multiple Social Security numbers being used by one person. .....EBT cards from Massachusetts being used in places like Hawaii, Las Vegas, and the Virgin Islands...... Tens of thousands of blank EBT cards missing from state welfare offices...... Repeated requests for "lost" benefit cards to be replaced.
The June 2013 report covered only a two-year period, identified at least $18 million in illegal or suspicious welfare payments If this sounds familiar, it should. Blistering exposés of welfare fraud and abuse, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, have become almost routine.
Over a 22-month period in New Jersey, that state's comptroller disclosed last week..... prison inmates collected almost $24 million in unlawful welfare benefits – including $10.6 million in UI nd $4.2 million in food stamps....... TV reporters in Florida documented the use of welfare benefit cards in strip clubs, liquor stores, bowling alleys, and bingo parlors........
A 65-year-old cashier in New Hampshire was fired last year for refusing to let a young man use an EBT card to buy cigarettes.
The new Massachusetts audit, meanwhile, followed an earlier report by the state's inspector general, who estimated that the state is squandering $25 million a year on improper welfare payments. And before that was a national investigation by the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program. It uncovered fraud in every state it reviewed.
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NY food stamp recipients ship welfare-funded groceries to Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Haiti
NY POST EXCLUSIVE Food stamps are paying to buy and ship food to Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A spokeswoman for the US Dept of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service said the $86 BILLION welfare program is reserved for poor US households that buy and prepare food. "States should intervene if people are caught shipping non-perishables abroad", she said. A senior fellow at the Cato Institute called it another example of welfare abuse. “The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid.” The US spent $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, govt data show. The $40 barrels are shipped filled with $500 to $2,000 worth of EBT-paid groceries to impoverished homelands.
Pioneer Supermarket, Brooklyn sells plastic barrels used to ship food to family members in the Caribbean / J.C. Rice