Tampa Woman Drew Public Assistance After Collecting $396,000 Settlement, Feds Say
Tampa Bay Times ^ | Patty Ryan
FR Posted by Iron Munro
TAMPA — For 13 years, a mother getting public assistance swore under penalty of perjury that she had no income or assets. The public paid her rent, provided food money and covered her son under Medicaid — at a total cost of $85,363, according to court records.
Latashia Green failed to mention the $396,000 paid to her from a 2010 legal settlement, or the $10,000 a year she earned braiding hair, or the real estate she bought along the way, federal authorities allege.
Green, 37, is expected to plead guilty in U.S. District Court on Tuesday to theft of public assistance benefits, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. She has no prior criminal record in Florida.
She collected $34,800 in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidies, $22,902 in U.S. Department of Agriculture food subsidies and $27,661 in Medicaid benefits, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Riedel wrote recently.
“Ms. Green never reported this income to any of the agencies listed above and continued to falsely state on applications and recertifications that she had no income,” Riedel wrote.
Green, who declined an interview request, acquired money the unfortunate way.
Her mother, Marcella Staten, was killed in 2009 trying to cross Busch Boulevard on foot, Tampa police records show. The driver stopped. He wasn’t charged.
The next year in Hillsborough County Circuit Court, an attorney opened a probate case to distribute a private settlement payable to Staten’s estate. Green was the personal representative. She and two other family members were named as beneficiaries.
Green’s name also turned up on deeds for residential properties in Hillsborough and Pasco counties.
Instead of reporting a changed financial situation to public assistance agencies, Green sublet her subsidized housing unit to someone else for $550 a month, the prosecutor wrote.
The unit was costing HUD $909 per month in rent and a $100 utility stipend.
Green was benefitting from a housing voucher program commonly known as Section 8. The demand for the vouchers is so great that applicants are no longer accepted on a waiting list. The program is administered by the Tampa Housing Authority, which referred Green to HUD’s Office of Inspector General for prosecution in 2013.
Tampa Housing Authority spokeswoman Lillian Stringer credited the thorough efforts of Assisted Housing Director Margaret Jones.
“We take fraud prevention very seriously and we will vigorously pursue every individual case to the fullest extent,” Stringer said. “We’re hopeful by reporting these incidents, that will deter any other participants from engaging in fraudulent activity.”
It’s called cultural knowledge, passed along and across a culture generationally, in this case how to scam the welfare state.
If you or I ever wanted to start a welfare scam, we’d be as hard-pressed to figure it out as these people are in order to start a legitimate business.
Just saw reference to a similar situation in a Letters to Editors in WSJ the other day about prisoner abuse of Social Security disability payments:
“Just as in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Mr. Feldstein seems to suggest that the “horses” should just “work harder” and longer. As a career adult parole officer and later a behavioral therapist in a close-security men’s state prison, I learned that the real problem with Social Security and Medicare are the millions of lazy and fraudulent disability and Medicaid recipients who abuse the system and pay absolutely nothing into it, ever. I have seen costly disability awards to ex-cons for “inability to get along with co-workers” and “prison trauma.” And to their effectively fatherless children, awards for “age-inappropriate behavior” and “mild scoliosis.” And Mr. Feldstein suggests trimming benefits to the working people who have actually paid for all this nonsense their whole lives?”