Question: The Riverside story broke a month ago. Why is the Sacramento Bee covering it in the January 9/10 issues, on the day that Governor Brown will unveil his “painful” budget that may profoundly affect CalWORKS Stage 3 monies?
Eight years of altering birth certificates and payroll stubs netted a Riverside County group of swindlers over $500K designated for providers of subsidized child care. After 16 months of investigation, Riverside DA Rod Pacheco (at left) announced fraud charges against seven people on Friday, and posted a photograph of the woman who is allegedly “the ringleader”: Stephanie Luna Vega, 38, a $51,115 child care liaison in the county department of education, was arrested in early December and held in the Robert Presley Detention Center on $528,000 bail.
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…The scheme was discovered by [Vega's] husband when they were getting divorced, the district attorney said. The husband found a bag in a closet that contained documents with a slight alteration of his name and $3,000 cash, prosecutors said in a news release.
He told relatives, who contacted the county office of education, which asked the county Department of Public Social Services to investigate and later district attorney’s investigators.
“If Ms. Vega hadn’t gotten divorced and left some incriminating papers behind, they might still be stealing,” Pacheco said.
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The county uses state and federal funds to pay child care providers for needy families, who may choose licensed day care facilities or in-home care by a relative.
In this case, prosecutors say the defendants created fake child care providers. They also created some fake children, and altered the names of actual children who were no longer part of the program, the release said.
Vega would make one of her relatives the provider for these fake children, prosecutors said. For instance, her father had nine fake children for whom prosecutors said he fraudulently received funds, a total of $314,000.
UPDATE JANUARY 10, 2010: The Sacramento Bee this morning reports on the tangled lines of authority in the state departments (both education and health/human services) that weaken the ability to deter and detect fraud within the CalWORKS (welfare-to-work) system:
The crux of the problem rests in the complicated way the $1.4 billion program, which serves 185,000 children, even with its long waiting list, is set up. The Education Department oversees most of the program because the concept was to include an educational component in the day care to boost disadvantaged children.
Part of the program is also administered by the Department of Social Services because recipients start on welfare and are given child care for six months while they seek a job. They are then required to have a job that doesn’t exceed a certain income to continue receiving aid.
While welfare laws require the Social Services Department to fund investigators to go after cheats, the Education Department has no funding or authorization to establish similar enforcement and no money to give its partner agency.
“We’ve sort of been round and round about this,” said Greg Hudson, South West regional director for the Department of Education…
Child-care providers are left in a bind when they suspect cheating because agencies have nowhere to take the case, said Denyne Kowalewski, executive director of the California Alternative Payment Program Association [CAPPA], which represents the [nearly 80] agencies that funnel the money from the Education Department to child-care providers.
“We have the indicators. We have the paperwork. Who do we hand it off to?” she said. “No one wants to take responsibility for it. It’s crazy.”
