Obama Administration Squanders $100 Million Paying Electric Bills of Dead People

posted at 12:21 pm on July 2, 2010 by Howard Portnoy

So this is what Barack Obama meant when he promised to change the way business was done in Washington: Take a bad situation and make it immeasurably worse.

The Associated Press reports that the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a federal program designed to help poor families heat and cool their homes, wasted more than $100 million of taxpayers’ money paying the electric bills of people who were (a) dead, (b) in prison, or (c) living in million-dollar mansions.

According to the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, the program, which is under the aegis of the Department of Health and Human Services, spent $5 billion in 2009, distributing funds to states. The operation was carried out with almost no oversight. As a result, your tax dollars helped, for example, to defray the electricity costs of a woman who lives in a $2 million home in a tony Chicago suburb and drives a Mercedes.

The GAO got wind of the problem following an investigation by Pennsylvania’s state auditor in 2007, which revealed that 429 applicants received more than $162,000 by using the Social Security numbers of dead people. Similarly improper payments have since been uncovered in seven other states, including Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Virginia. All told, about 9 percent of funds from the program totaling $116 million ended up in the pockets of  unqualified individuals.

Although individual states bear the brunt of the responsibility for ensuring that federal funds are properly allocated, the study determined that lax supervision by HHS was a key contributing factor in the scam.

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