Article Courtesy of The
Miami Herald
By David Ovalle
Published July 18, 2022
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Two Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office employees have been demoted after
supervisors discovered a backlog of 700-plus fraud complaints stretching
back years. The result: Hundreds of cases cannot be filed because the
allegations are now too old, and taxpayers have lost out on potentially
millions in restitution. The complaints had been referred to prosecutors by
Florida’s Division of Public Assistance Fraud, which investigates people
suspected of abusing programs that help families buy food and baby formula,
get disability benefits and receive Medicaid benefits. A State Attorney’s
spokesman said the office is still reviewing “boxes and boxes” of complaints
to see how many went un-reviewed by paralegal Tracy Davis, of the Economic
Crimes Unit, whose job was to review complaints and send them to
prosecutors. According to a July 6 discipline memo, Davis had “over 700
pending cases” that had yet to be processed.
Prosecutors may now be unable to file hundreds of those criminal cases
because the statute of limitations, generally three or five years depending
on the charge, has expired. They’re still trying to figure out exactly how
many cases will be lost. An analysis by the State Attorney’s Office, for
example, showed that 226 cases from 2017 have been lost because they are too
old, cases that could have netted $2.3 million in restitution through the
criminal court system. Another 185 cases expired in 2019, the state said.
“In law enforcement, it is always disappointing to have trusted employees
failing to do their jobs responsibly,” said Ed Griffith, a State Attorney’s
spokesman. The State Attorney’s Office did not make Davis, nor her
supervisor, who was also demoted, available for comment. Both were demoted
to a lower level of duties, and had their salaries cut. Based in
Tallahassee, the Division of Public Assistance Fraud probes claims of abuse
from a variety of federally funded programs administered by state agencies.
Among them: the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP),
sometimes referred to as food stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF).
Often, that might include someone who doesn’t report income over a period of
two years, during which they received food assistance and Medicaid.
Prosecutions often result in defendants being accepted into a “pretrial
diversion” program, in which they pay restitution and complete courses in
exchange for the charges later being dropped. Every year, the fraud division
— which falls under the office of Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy
Patronis — generally refers about 650 fraud complaints to prosecutor offices
across the state, and takes another 800 or so to administrative courts.
Since 2015, the office has referred nearly 1,200 cases of suspected crimes
to Miami-Dade prosecutors, according to the Florida Department of Financial
Services, which oversees the fraud division. For those cases, over-payments
to recipients amounted to $15,737,706.
During that time period, the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office filed just
263 cases, involving over-payments of $3,922,226. Exactly how much in
restitution was lost out on remains unclear. Apart from seeking criminal
prosecutions, the Department of Financial Services can also seek restitution
through administrative hearings, although those records are not maintained
in a central database. The State Attorney’s Office says the backlog problems
began in 2016. That’s when the prosecutor who reviewed those cases, Bill
McGee, retired and the responsibilities of an initial review were moved to
paralegals.
According to the discipline memo, Davis told supervisors that she’d stopped
forwarding files to prosecutors because they were not returning the cases to
her for processing “in a timely fashion.” In 2022, she had only provided
prosecutors with six cases for review, “leaving the vast majority of cases
on hold on your end, which ultimately made the situation worse,” the memo
said. She also admitted to ignoring emails about the backlog from the
Department of Financial Services. Her supervisor, Taline Starr, was also
demoted because she knew about the backlog “for several years,” and the
problem only worsened. Her inability to “coach or counsel” Davis led to the
“pending workload to grow to an unmanageable level,” according to her
discipline memo. Prosecutors say they have rehired McGee, the prosecutor, to
help chip away at the backlog and handle new complaints. Griffith, the State
Attorney’s spokesman, suggested that Financial Services never brought the
issue to the attention of supervisors with the prosecutor’s office. “While
it is perplexing that Financial Services never sought supervisory
intervention to resolve this backlog issue before it got out of hand,” he
said, “that does not excuse any detrimental action by a State Attorney’s
Office employee.” The CFO’s office, in a statement, said it “takes public
assistance fraud seriously and continues to work with State Attorney’s
Offices and additional fraud partners statewide to present cases for
prosecution and better protect the funding that is designated to assist
families that need public assistance the most.”
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