American society was designed based on the premise that citizens would behave in moral and trustworthy ways – but, those days are over due to fraudsters like those bilking billions of dollars of taxpayer money from the nation’s benefits programs – Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson says.
“Our benefits programs and our whole society was designed for a high trust people,” Ferguson, the vice chair of the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, told a meeting of attorneys general from across the U.S. on Tuesday:
“The American people rightly expect that their fellow citizens will deal with them and with the government honestly and fairly. That's why for up until the last decade or so, shelves in our grocery stores and pharmacies were open and readily accessible.”
Today, however, large numbers of immoral and unethical people are exploiting and degrading the nation’s cultural trust to illegally enrich themselves, Ferguson said:
“We didn't have to worry about organized retail theft or industrial-scale scammers, the type you all protect your citizens from every day. Nor did we have to worry about fraudsters raiding our benefits program.
“Sadly, that is no longer true. It's become clear huge groups of people in this country are taking advantage of our long-standing cultural trust to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.”
“The social trust has evaporated and people are taking advantage of it, and the same is true with our federal benefits programs,” Ferguson explained:
“Huge segments of the population have decided to take advantage of this generosity and trust of American citizens through deception and fraud, and billions and billions of dollars each year leave our programs into the hands of pirates, fraudsters, scammers and gangs who treat American generosity as little more than a get quick rich scheme. We shouldn't have to live this way.”
“The American people are right to long for a period where we could trust each other” – but, because of the current environment – the government must take action to protect American citizens and their social programs, Ferguson said.
Still, the anti-fraud initiative isn't just about restoring social trust in America; it’s also about protecting benefits programs so that they’ll still be there for the people who pay for them when they’re needed, Ferguson added.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller followed Ferguson by concurring that benefits program fraud proliferated as America lost its moral compass and stopped abiding by the nation’s foundational “honor system”:
“All of the systems in our country, whether you're talking about voting, whether you're talking about entitlements, whether you're talking about welfare benefits, were set up based on the honor system. They're set up based on the idea you can trust the average person – through their own morality – to abide by the rules and comply with the law.
“The way most welfare works in most places is: we take your word for it. If you sign a piece of paper and you say your kids are hungry, you are going to get food stamps. We don't check, as a country, if you even have kids. It's as basic as that. We don't even check if you have children. You will just start getting the checks.
“And so, what's happened to our country is: we became a society, as we've seen with the Somali refugee problem in Minnesota, where you have a large number of people that are not following the honor system. They're not playing by the rules. They're not abiding by our laws.”
“And the amount that has been fleeced from us is in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” Miller said, adding that he’d been told that the federal budget could be balanced by eliminating all fraudulently-obtained benefits.
Since its creation in March, the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has already saved billions of dollars from fraud, Vice President Vance, the White House task force’s chairman, reported in his opening remarks:
“Let me just recap for the benefit of our friends in the media: In just two months, we exposed billions of dollars in benefits that have been stolen from the American people.”
Vance detailed some of the task force’s anti-fraud accomplishments:
- Referred over $22 billion in fraudulent small business loans back to the Treasury for collection.
- Deferred more $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicaid reimbursements that were coming from various states, particularly California.
- Put a six-month hold on enrollment for new hospice and home healthcare providers, “because so many of the newer hospice providers were not actually providing hospice services, but were just focused on fraud.”
- Recovered taxpayer funds from the $135 billion stolen “after the floodgates were opened in the immediate aftermath of COVID.”
- Uncovered $6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts.
- Blocked $60 million in student aid fraud that should have gone to young people trying to get an education, but instead had been going to fraudsters.
