[poochee]

Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Identity theft tax fraud on the rise with no easy fix
Daniel Chang | The Miami Herald

Last-minute filers have more to worry about than meeting today’s deadline to file taxes.

Many are likely to learn that someone else has beat them to the punch: identity thieves.

A growing crime across the country and particularly in South Florida, which leads the nation in reported incidents, according to the Federal Trade Commission, tax fraud by identity theft creates victims of taxpayers who must wait months or longer for their legitimate refund, and the U.S. government, which pays out the fraudulent refunds.

Experts say identity thieves need only three pieces of information to file a fraudulent tax return electronically: a name, Social Security number and date of birth. This kind of personal information can be obtained from a variety of sources, including hospitals and trade schools. Identity thieves also target the personal information of the dead, which can be culled from publicly available lists.

To be sure, there is one way the IRS could prevent most tax fraud by identity theft: return to paper filing, said Nina E. Olson, the national Taxpayer Advocate for the IRS, who testified at the March senate hearing.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/04/1...#storylink=cpy

[poochee]

107 charged in health care fraud bust
Keep up the good work Mr Holder!
By Terry Frieden, CNN
updated 6:20 PM EDT, Wed May 2, 2012

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
NEW: At least 91 of the defendants in the case have been taken into custody, officials say
Federal agents say the operation uncovered $450 million in false billings
Arrests in seven metro areas wrap up an investigation of several months

Authorities pointed to an alleged scheme involving community mental health centers in Baton Rouge as the largest and among the most egregious. Seven people were charged in an alleged operation that involved recruiting beneficiaries from nursing homes and homeless shelters -- some of whom were drug addicted or mentally ill -- and provided them with no services or with medically inappropriate services.

Officials from the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services said most of the suspects were charged with making false claims against the Medicare program. Authorities said they participated in schemes that brought charges of conspiracy, health care fraud, violation of anti-kickback statutes and money laundering.

Disgusting!

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/justic...th-care-fraud/

[poochee]

Energy Department cuts payments to 4 federal lab workers
By Carol D. Leonnig, Published: May 18

Four high-ranking federal lab workers found a way to turn “per diem” funds for a temporary assignment into a steady flow of extra income — at taxpayers’ expense. The overpayments, discovered in an inspector general’s audit, boosted the annual pay of some of the employees by as much as $64,000.[/B]

Two of the Princeton lab employees worked on what the department considered a “temporary” travel detail for a scientific partnership at a General Atomics research facility in San Diego — one for 14 years and another for nine years. But both had long ago moved to the San Diego area.

“We have verified that no other laboratories have similar extended arrangements in place beyond three years, and we have replaced the 1998 policy with a strong, new department-wide policy that prevents reimbursements for extended assignments beyond three years and requires rigorous review of those assignments to ensure that taxpayers are getting the value they are expecting,” Dan Leistikow, an Energy Department spokesman, said Friday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...y.html?hpid=z3

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...y.html?hpid=z3

[poochee]

Posted on Friday, July 20, 2012
Alaska drug probe uncovers massive tax fraud operation
By Casey Grove | Anchorage Daily News

While investigating Anchorage cocaine dealers, authorities discovered a massive identity theft and tax fraud operation that illegally claimed about $19 million in federal tax refunds, prosecutors said.

U.S. Attorney for Alaska Karen Loeffler said Thursday it's unclear exactly how much cash the federal government paid out to the defendants: seven illegal immigrants, three living in the country legally and a corrupt Wells Fargo bank employee, the U.S. citizen, who helped the alleged fraudsters. The 10 residents of Mexico and the Dominican Republic, working with a United States citizen, sent at least some of the money they allegedly stole from the U.S. Treasury out of the country, according to an indictment handed up this week.

"It's a very large tax fraud case, and what I would call organized crime," Loeffler said Thursday. "This is certainly the biggest (tax) case we've brought down in Alaska."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/2...#storylink=cpy

[poochee]

Krystle Marie Reyes Gets 5 1/2 Years For $2.1 Million Bogus Tax Refund
AP | Posted: 07/25/2012 12:05 am

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — A 25-year-old woman who duped the state of Oregon into giving her a $2.1 million tax refund pleaded guilty Tuesday and was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison.

The woman received the refund on a debit card and spent about $150,000 before twice reporting the card lost or stolen. At that point the ruse was discovered. The state has recovered about $1.9 million of the money.

Reyes filed an electronic tax return in late January via Turbo Tax, erroneously reporting earnings of more than $3 million, authorities have said. Her request for a $2.1 million refund was initially red-flagged by an automated system.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...tml?ref=topbar

[poochee]

Report finds for-profit colleges serve shareholders over students
By Daniel de Vise, Published: July 29The Washington Post

The new report is titled “For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success.” It concludes a two-year investigation by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Including appendixes, the document totals about 800 pages.

“We uncovered two very big problems in for-profit higher education,” Harkin said in a statement. “One, billions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered. And two, many for-profit schools are doing real, lasting harm to the students they enroll.”

But for-profit colleges have failed to support those students, the report states, by prizing recruitment over retention. The colleges studied spent 23 percent of their revenue on marketing and recruiting, the report found, and 17 percent on instruction.

The publicly traded companies that operate for-profit colleges yielded an average profit margin of 20 percent in 2009 and paid an average $7.3 million to their chief executives, the report found.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...rc=nl_politics

[poochee]

IRS May Have Lost Billions To Identity Theft, Treasury Says
By JOSH LEDERMAN 08/02/12 03:39 PM ET AP

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service may have delivered more than $5 billion in refund checks to identity thieves who filed fraudulent tax returns for 2011, Treasury Department investigators said Thursday. They estimate another $21 billion could make its way to ID thieves' pockets over the next five years.

The IRS is detecting far fewer fraudulent tax refund claims than actually occur, according to a government audit that warned the widespread problem could undermine public trust in the U.S. tax system. Although the IRS detected about 940,000 fraudulent returns for last year claiming $6.5 billion in refunds, there were potentially another 1.5 million undetected cases of thieves seeking refunds after assuming the identity of a dead person, child or someone else who normally wouldn't file a tax return.

The IRS said it is already putting a number of new measures in place, including new ID theft screening filters that will hold on to refunds until the IRS can verify a taxpayer's identity. That filter had thwarted about $1.3 billion in potentially fraudulent refunds through April, the audit said. Another system flags returns filed with Social Security numbers of those who have died.

For those who fall victim to identity thieves, the recovery process can be less than smooth. A separate report by the inspector general in May found that the IRS wasn't providing good customer service and proper assistance to victims of ID theft, increasing the burden for those whose identities are stolen. The Federal Trade Commission has listed identity theft as the No. 1 consumer complaint for the past 12 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1733905.html

[poochee]

Chris Kirkham
For-Profit College Group Fights To Keep Students In Dark On Debt
Posted: 08/23/2012 12:51 pm Updated: 08/23/2012 1:14 pm

In a court filing last week, a key industry trade group pushed back against the Department of Education's attempts to make for-profit colleges disclose statistics that would indicate whether students are likely to take on huge debts they cannot repay. Preliminary data released by the department earlier this year indicates that many of the for-profit programs would be cast in a negative light by making the disclosures, which would reveal that students are shouldering massive debt burdens and are often unable to repay student loans.

The student debt measurements have been at the center of the Obama administration's attempts to rein in abuses at for-profit institutions, which charge much higher tuition than public institutions and have a track record of leaving students deep in debt and without improved job prospects. For-profit schools derive the vast majority of revenues from the federal government, in the form of student loans and grants, and the reforms were intended to track whether such schools are delivering on promises of career training.

"The for-profits want the American people to just hand them over millions of dollars worth of federal financial aid, and we have no means to assess the return on that investment," said Jose Cruz, vice president for higher education policy at the Education Trust, a student advocacy group. "It is important for the students to have the information that will allow them to gauge whether or not it's a good investment for them."

The for-profit college association has mounted federal court challenges to nearly every new regulation the Obama administration has proposed regarding the industry. That includes rules to crack down on schools that make misleading promises to students in advertisements, and guidelines to prevent schools from handing out bonuses and raises to recruiters based on the number of students enrolled. The courts have upheld most parts of the administration's other regulations, aside from the "gainful employment" rules.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1823215.html

[poochee]

For-profit schools taking in millions from GI Bill
Disgusting!
Chris Vaughn | Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Jim DePaolo, laid off just weeks before, was stunned.

"This person was introduced as 'She has a lot of good and important information, and she will help you be successful,' " DePaolo said. "We were right there in Richardson, just a few miles from (the University of Texas at Dallas). They weren't there. No other school was. I can't begin to tell you how frustrated I was."

DePaolo, an Air Force veteran, had once been a student at the University of Phoenix, an experience he described as "terrible" and a "wasted" year of hard-earned government benefits. More shocking than the sales pitch, he said, was the perceived endorsement the school received from the Texas Workforce Commission.

Perhaps it shouldn't have been shocking. For-profit universities such as the University of Phoenix, DeVry University, Strayer University, Ashford University and Kaplan University - typically called "career colleges" - have marketed themselves to veterans so successfully that they are taking in tens of millions of dollars annually in taxpayer money after the passage of the Post-9/11 GI
Bill.

For-profit colleges account for 13 of the 15 universities that have received the most GI Bill money in the last three years.

"Their mission is not to educate," said Tom Tarantino, chief policy director for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a New York-based advocacy organization for young veterans. "Their mission is to make a profit. I've got no problem if they make money as long as they're producing graduates with a quality education. That's not the case."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/0...#storylink=cpy

[poochee]

Feds: Teachers embroiled in test-taking fraud
ADRIAN SAINZ | November 25, 2012 10:42 AM EST | AP
Compare other versions »

For 15 years, teachers in three Southern states paid Clarence Mumford Sr. – himself a longtime educator – to send someone else to take the tests in their place, authorities said. Each time, Mumford received a fee of between $1,500 and $3,000 to send one of his test ringers with fake identification to the Praxis exam. In return, his customers got a passing grade and began their careers as cheaters, according to federal prosecutors in Memphis.

Authorities say the scheme affected hundreds – if not thousands – of public school students who ended up being taught by unqualified instructors.

Mumford "obtained tens of thousands of dollars" during the alleged conspiracy, which prosecutors say lasted from 1995 to 2010 in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-w...ge&ir=homepage

[poochee]

February 21, 2013 8:57 AM
The SCOOTER Store power wheelchair company raided in federal probe
ByJeff Glor, Ben Eisler .

CBS News) Last month, "CBS This Morning" aired an investigation into the power wheelchair industry. .

Critics say it's putting seniors in costly equipment they don't need, and ripping off the government for what may be hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Now law enforcement is taking action.

On Wednesday, 150 federal and state agents raided The SCOOTER Store headquarters in New Braunfels, Texas, and agents remain on the site. CBS News just spoke to an FBI agent Thursday morning who said workers will not be allowed back into headquarters through the day as the nation's largest power wheelchair company remains under investigation

Late last year, former employees told CBS News the company's main goal is not to help patients -- it's to bulldoze doctors into writing prescriptions to boost profits. Former SCOOTER Store employee Brian Setzer said, "Bulldoze and get them to get the paperwork done."

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505266_1...federal-probe/

[poochee]

Grocer gets 2.5-year sentence for $844,000 food stamp fraud
By Amanda Bonafiglia, NBCChicago.com

An Illinois grocer was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in federal prison Monday for defrauding government and nutrition programs.

Khaled Saleh, 48, the owner of Sunset Food Market in Waukegan was charged with illegally exchanging cash with customers using food stamp cards and nutrition coupons during an undercover investigation.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013...amp-fraud?lite

[poochee]

Former Atlanta Schools Chief Indicted In Cheating Scandal
By KATE BRUMBACK 03/29/13 07:30 PM ET EDT AP

Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faced charges including racketeering, false statements and theft because prosecutors said some of the bonuses she received were tied to falsified scores.

The criminal investigation lasted 21 months and the allegations date back to 2005. In addition to Hall, 34 people were indicted: four high-level administrators, six principals; two assistant principals; six testing coordinators; 14 teachers; a school improvement specialist and a school secretary.

All of the people named in the indictment face conspiracy charges. Other charges in the 65-count indictment include false statements and writings, false swearing, theft and influencing witnesses.

The tests were the key measure the state used to determine whether it met the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools with good test scores get extra federal dollars to spend in the classroom or on teacher bonuses.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_2982272.html

[poochee]

Defense contractors plan to plead guilty to overbilling, paying kickbacks
By Carol D. Leonnig,
Published: April 10
Alice R. Crites contributed to this report.

Two brothers whose defense business flourished with the help of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) plan to plead guilty next week to overbilling the Defense Department for their work and paying kickbacks to win business, according to their attorneys and court records.

William and Ron Kuchera, who together owned Kuchera Defense Systems and Kuchera Industries in Windber, Pa., are accused by federal prosecutors of billing the military $650,000 for supplies they never provided and conspiring to inflate their bills for other military work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...rc=nl_politics

Murtha was under invsestigation at the time of his death.

[nittiley]

Thirty-four colleges audited recently by the Internal Revenue Service underpaid their taxes on unrelated business income by nearly $90-million, and nearly 20 percent of the private colleges in the group violated rules for nonprofit organizations in determining the compensation of their chief executives, according to a final report issued on Thursday by the federal agency.

The audits, the report says, "identified some significant issues ... that may well be present elsewhere across the tax-exempt sector."

http://chronicle.com/article/34-Coll...&utm_medium=en