Fraud investigators in Washington state say they expect to announce a major case of public welfare theft next month.
Food stamp theft and misuse of welfare benefits happens every day in Washington state. The job of stopping it falls to the three-year-old Office of Fraud and Accountability within the Department of Social and Health Services.
In one year alone, the team investigated more than 4,000 criminal fraud cases and referred nearly 300 of them for prosecution. Add to that the hundreds of welfare fraud tips that come into a hotline each month.
Steve Lowe, a former county prosecutor who heads the fraud office, acknowledged there’s still a lot more work to do.
“We’ve been so busy on the criminal cases trying to put criminal cases [together], it’s been so much work," he said. "I have 11 criminal investigators, they each have an average caseload now of 40 cases.”
The Fraud office also gets more than 7,000 requests per year to review suspicious applications for public benefits.
