Inside Job

How the Government is Stealing from You. That’s Not a Metaphor.

We are often warned about the cogs in the government machine who wield power far disproportionate to their qualifications or brain power.  There’s the TSA agent who could keep you off a flight for failure to wear a covid muzzle.  Or the IRS agent whose questions about your charitable giving lead to an audit.  Last week I learned this lesson again when I called Social Security for my mother to find out why her payment had not been direct deposited into her bank account.  But this lesson was even more sinister and alarming.  I learned an government employee had stolen from my mother.

“It looks like when you called last month you updated the bank information,” said the woman who answered my call. 

“No.  No, I did not.  I changed the mailing address.  There was no change to the bank information,” I replied, my voice flat and firm. 

“Do you use this bank?” she asked, naming a nationally recognized bank.

“No,” I said.  “The same bank account has been used since the benefits started.  Ten years.  No change ever.”

“Ok.  I’ll fill out a fraud report,” she replied.  “They’ll investigate.” 

My mind raced.  Fraud?  Who could have taken the money?  Then I grasped what she was saying.

“An internal investigation?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she said.  “My worst suspicion is that the employee who took your call last month changed the bank information to their own bank.  I’ve heard of that happening.”

My eyes widened in disbelief.  This is the same government agency warning retirees about people calling them and pretending to be Social Security personnel, and then coaxing financial and personal data from them and stealing their identities and savings.  It’s the same agency that has installed obnoxious apparatus to prevent people from calling Social Security on behalf of their elderly parents to update addresses, request tax forms, and inquire about missing payments—precisely the type of call I’d made that uncovered this fraud.

I thought about this behemoth bureaucracy of Social Security and its thousands of employees with unfettered access to the bank accounts of retired people, many of whom rely almost exclusively on monthly benefits for living expenses.  I thought of the many retirees who are not physically, cognitively, or technologically equipped to vigilantly review and examine bank transactions, identify and question missing payments, and then navigate the cornfield of Social Security phone numbers and recordings and wait times. 

How often do Social Security employees steal from retirees?  Often enough that there’s a fraud report and investigation process, and that the person I spoke with about the missing payment did not recommend I check other accounts for unusual activity or request a credit report, but instead immediately suggested a Social Security employee was at fault.

How many of these Social Security employees are “working from home” now?  Has the incidence of fraud increased since 2019?  In 2019, I imagine someone considering theft would not follow through if he’s sitting in a cubicle surrounded by co-workers who might rat him out and a manager over his shoulder.  Now that same person is possibly at home unsupervised, uninhibited, and able to carry out his worst intentions.  No police on the street means no deterrence. 

This mindset is further cultivated by the landscape of government incompetence, recklessness and deliberate misconduct that regularly goes unpunished.  Add to this the sense of entitlement that the Biden cartel has instilled in certain demographic segments of the population.  You’ve paid your dues.  You deserve this!  If you think race isn’t a factor, think again.  The government has made it a factor: the fraud report form asks for the victim’s “ethnicity.”  How could this possibly be relevant to the investigation?  Is the “ethnicity” of the thieving employee relevant to prosecution and punishment?  Is this theft or reparations?

What happens after the investigation?  It shouldn’t be difficult to connect the unauthorized bank routing number to the account holder and confirm it’s a Social Security employee.  Can the government claw back the stolen funds?  Or do those funds disappear into the bottomless well of government waste that is now so rampant as to be incalculable?  The stolen funds represent money extracted from us as taxpayers.  In our hands it had value.

Someone, please surprise me with accountability and retribution for government misconduct.  It would be headline news.