Larry Keller| Special to The Post
- The Office of the Inspector General is still investigating fraudulent claims for COVID-19 assistance.
- The county received about $261 million in federal CARES Act money in 2020 to provide relief to eligible individuals, businesses and governments affected by the pandemic.
- The OIG has investigated 15 cases in which it says people received the money using false information.
Four years after Palm Beach County began providing financial help for rent, utilities and food to eligible residents impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Office of the Inspector General is still investigating fraudulent claims for that assistance.
“It takes a while to identify them,” said Stuart Robinson, the OIG’s director of investigations. “Sometimes it takes a while to do things like getting bank records.” And some people get caught applying later for other rental help when information they provide conflicts with that on the COVID-related application, he added.
Palm Beach County received about $261 million in federal CARES Act money in 2020 to provide relief to eligible individuals, businesses and governments affected by the pandemic. The county designated $40 million for emergency mortgage, rental and utility assistance.
The OIG has investigated 15 cases in which it says people received the money using false information.
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In the latest, a West Palm Beach woman allegedly received $11,202 in 2020 and 2021 for help paying her rent, a past due electric bill and food after submitting fraudulent stubs and a bogus memo from her employer. The OIG referred its report to law enforcement agencies and the county will seek reimbursem*nt.
She is unlikely to be prosecuted. The state attorney’s office has charged only one person on a CARES Act referral, said spokesman Marc Freeman. That 2023 case ended in April with a plea bargain in which the defendant got five years probation and agreed to pay $21,553 restitution in monthly installments of at least $360.
Procedurally, a law enforcement agency takes a CARES Act case to the state attorney’s office, which then reviews the strength of the evidence.
Two of the woman’s applications for aid were approved and a third was denied, according to the OIG. She said that she was a private contractor therapist for Turning Point Mental Health Center in Plantation and had lost hours and clients because of the pandemic.
To document this, she submitted an emailed memo from a Turning Point manager to its staff and a second memo from founder and CEO Michelle Montero-Caicedo, regarding the indefinite closure of the office and the need to work remotely. The applicant also provided seven pay stubs with dates that didn’t coincide with when her work purportedly was done.
Montero-Caicedo told the OIG that neither memo was authentic and that the one purportedly sent by her included a cell phone number that was not hers. It actually was that of the applicant, the OIG said.
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The pay stubs weren’t issued by her company, Montero-Caicedo said. She provided investigators with invoices for the actual payments that didn’t match the dates or payment amounts on the pay stubs.
Confronted with all of this, the applicant said she didn’t know whose phone number she had included on the purported email from Montero-Caicedo, but denied it was her own. She said the Turning Point email she submitted with her claim wasn’t an original but one she copied and pasted onto a different document. She “could have put some incorrect information on there,” the OIG quoted her as saying.
The woman said she didn’t recognize the second email she submitted from a Turning Point manager and didn’t know how it got into her application submission. She acknowledged she didn’t receive pay stubs from Turning Point, but created them herself.
Hers is the third CARES Act case this year in which a person allegedly obtained benefits with false information. In one, a woman who received $8,600 in rental assistance on behalf of her mother claimed to be her mother’s landlord.
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“The problem was that the mother had died before the COVID era, and she wasn’t the landlord of the property,” Robinson said. Plus, the woman spent $203 of a $900 food assistance card on a car loan payment.
In addition to 15 COVID-19-related rental assistance cases, the OIG has also reported a dozen suspicious CARES Act financial assistance claims by businesses. The agency says it has recouped about $250,000 in all of these cases — a number that is growing. ”A lot of individuals are on a payment program,” Robinson said.
He added, “We want the money to go to the people who need it.”
