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The Schwarzenegger administration says tough new criminal screening rules for in-home care providers have snared 531 who are ineligible to work in the program mostly because of certain criminal convictions. But Sacramento County officials say 47 of the 57 workers the state identified as ineligible to provide care here had been turned over by the district attorney’s office as having been convicted of In-Home Supportive Services fraud within the span of the last two to three years — before fingerprinting and other screening rules went into place.
The situation in Sacramento suggests it may be some time before the state has numbers that can be used to draw conclusions about the depth of fraud within the IHSS program.
Rachel Arrezola, a spokeswoman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said the provider screening process is not over yet.
“The bottom line for us is that any fraud in the system is unacceptable,” she said. Some of the results of the screenings so far, she said, show “that the reforms that were put in place are doing their job.”
Facing a massive budget crisis, Schwarzenegger last year championed cracking down on fraud within IHSS, which provides subsidized aid to low-income disabled and elderly people.
The program is subsidized with a mix of federal, state and county money and at $1.5 billion is one of the state’s largest social programs. Urged on by the governor, the Legislature during budget votes allocated about $36 million last year for new anti-fraud screening and county-led investigations.
As of last November, all new caregivers had to submit to the new enrollment and screening process. Caregivers already on the job at that time had until June 30 to begin at least some of the screening.
As of July 9, data collected by the state DSS shows that criminal background checks have led to the discovery of 531 providers who are ineligible.
Sacramento County’s share of that figure was 57 out of 23,967 providers, according to a state chart.
But Rick Simonson, Sacramento County’s IHSS public authority, who supervises the program, said 47 of those 57 people had already been disqualified before the new vetting began.
The Sacramento County District Attorney’s office had passed along the 47 names to IHSS supervisors, Simonson said, to warn them that those 47 people had already been convicted of IHSS fraud within the span of the last two to three years.
Simonson said 10 people in total have been caught in Sacramento County by the new background screening. The specific convictions that disqualify providers are elder or child abuse or fraud of a government program.
“There is fraud within IHSS, and our district attorney has done a good job of ferreting this out,” Simonson said. But he said some estimates of IHSS fraud – as high as 25 percent of its expenditures, according to the governor and some grand jury reports – seem exaggerated.
The state also reports that 15,743 providers statewide had not submitted to any of the new anti-fraud requirements by June 30, which include signing two documents, one under penalty of perjury, and an orientation with stern warnings about fraud.
These providers have been dropped from payroll systems for failure to re-enroll.
Patrick Sequeira, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who works on welfare fraud, suggested to the Los Angeles Daily News recently that the withdrawal of so many caregivers from the program showed that anti-fraud measures were having an impact.
The state, in a chart, identifies 224 of those 15,743 caregivers as Sacramento County providers. But Simonson said that the number is wrong.
“I can tell you that out of the 224 people, 190 of them had completed some or all the provider enrollment by June 30,” Simonson said. He said the county reported this to the state, “but it just didn’t get from our system to their system.”
The state’s chart shows that 124,963 providers had completed some but not all of the vetting steps required. Most of those providers actually have until December to complete all new anti-fraud enrollment requirements.
Simonson said that in Sacramento County 26 out of the 224 caregivers who had supposedly not re-enrolled had been off the IHSS payroll for some time – probably because they got new jobs or the person they cared for died.
Out of the 224, Simonson said, “that leaves eight people who haven’t done anything.”
