According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the federal government helped pay the home air conditioning bills for more than 11,000 dead people, 1,100 federal employees, and 725 convicts in fiscal year 2009.
The payments were made by a $5 billion program known as the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).
LIHEAP is designed to provide federal assistance, administered by the states, to help people pay the energy bills to heat their homes in the winter and cool them in the summer.
The GAO examined the LIHEAP programs in seven states: Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and New Jersey and found evidence of fraud in each state.
Most glaring among the problems the GAO found were payments of LIHEAP benefits to dead people, some of whom, records show, had been dead for quite a long time.
The GAO matched LIHEAP data with federal civilian payroll records and found about 1,100 federal employees whose federal salary exceeded the maximum income threshold at the time of their application.
One such case involved a Chicago-area Postal Service employee making $80,000 per year!
The program also provided subsidies to the wife of another Chicago-area postal worker, who earned $84,000 per year, after the wife certified that her husband had no income.
The third chronic issue the GAO discovered was that the program repeatedly paid the air conditioning and heating bill of convicts who were in jail at the time the payments were made!
More here.
A picture of my cave
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