Chris Bray argues in a Federalist column that the fight against government fraud requires a cultural shift.
In a new announcement on social media, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz said that federal officials believe they’ve found billions of dollars in medical fraud in California, along with other forms of not-yet-fully-quantified social services fraud that make Minnesota look like a minor criminal fiefdom by comparison. There’s an enormous hidden problem with fraud on that scale, and breaking up the grift is going to be harder than Americans might think. …
… Federal prosecutors charged a Los Angeles resident named Alexander Soofer last week with a whole bunch of wire fraud, after he allegedly helped himself to at least $10 million from the $23 million in public funds he was paid to house and feed homeless people. …
… So, at the very least, five or six agencies chased dozens of witnesses, nine LLCs and general corporations, an untold number of other allegedly fake companies, a long list of bank accounts, a countywide network of real estate, and a series of credit card statements, the latter producing detailed statements in the complaint about the luxury goods Soofer allegedly purchased using public funds. …
… Do the math in your head: How many cops, doing how many hours of investigation, will it take to unravel tens of billions of dollars of overlapping fraud in government-funded health care, transportation, daycare, and homeless services nonprofits, in California and Minnesota and wherever else large numbers of nonprofits chase a massive pool of federal, state, and local public funds? …
… We’re not a country that maintains a culture of honesty through coercion and punishment, or expects to. Our police do their work at the margins and are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.
The first place to stop fraud is with a healthy culture. The second place to stop it is in a limited government that doesn’t offer a bunch of free cash for thieves to steal. The third solution, investigations and arrests, is clumsy, slow, and likely to prove grossly inadequate.
