Our tax dollars at work. From the New York Times:
Charges for 106 in Huge Fraud Over Disability
The retired New York City police officers and firefighters showed up for their psychiatric exams disheveled and disoriented, most following a nearly identical script.
They had been coached on how to fail memory tests, feign panic attacks and, if they had worked during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, to talk about their fear of airplanes and entering skyscrapers, prosecutors said. And they were told to make it clear they could not leave the house, much less find a job.
But their Facebook pages told investigators a starkly different story, according to an indictment and other court papers.
Former police officers who had told government doctors they were too mentally scarred to leave home had posted photographs of themselves fishing, riding motorcycles, driving water scooters, flying helicopters and playing basketball.
"The brazenness is shocking," Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said on Tuesday.
A bit more:
The online photos, along with intercepted phone calls and the testimony of undercover officers, were evidence of what officials said was the largest fraud ever perpetrated against the Social Security disability system, a scheme stretching back to 1988 in which as many as 1,000 people - many of them officers and firefighters already collecting pensions from the city - were suspected to have bilked the federal government out of an estimated $400 million.
And you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Wonder what is happening in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, etc. These operations do not arise from a vacuum...
