Bounties Paid for 'Working' Dead No Joke

Sept 22, 2006: The Province

Welfare deadbeats who were actually dead ended up costing B.C. taxpayers big bucks in a bungled welfare-to-work program.

That's the finding of a newly released internal audit that says the government wasted up to $4 million a year in erroneous overpayments to private job-search contractors.

The private companies were supposed to receive payments of up to $4,500 for every welfare recipient they helped to find work.

But the internal audit says the companies likely received payments for people who left the welfare rolls but who didn't land jobs -- such as welfare recipients who died or left the province.

The loophole in the program's data-collection system meant between $1 million and $4 million a year was paid out by mistake.

"This is shocking mismanagement of public funds," Jagrup Brar, NDP critic for employment assistance, told me yesterday. "The premier must take steps immediately to see if there are ways to get this money back."

But Employment and Income Minister Claude Richmond said the problems identified in the audit have already been corrected.

"We now have much tighter controls over these payments," he said, adding that there are no plans to try to recover any overpayments to contractors.

Here's how this screw-up with your money went down: The welfare-to-work program began in 2002. The government boasts 48,000 welfare recipients have been moved into the workforce because of it.

Under the program, job-search contractors who helped a welfare recipient find work were paid about $1,100, ministry spokesman Richard Chambers told me.

If the client continued to stay off the welfare rolls, the companies were eligible for bonus payments of around $700 every three months, to a maximum of $4,500 for every welfare recipient moved to the workforce.

Just one problem: Sometimes people left the welfare rolls for reasons other than finding a job.

Maybe they moved to Alberta. Or maybe they were kicked off welfare because of the two-year time limit for collecting benefits. Or maybe they just plain died.

Shockingly, in many of those cases, the government's job-placement contractors were paid their money anyway.

"We estimate the possible financial exposure to the ministry from inaccurate billing data to be between $1 million and $4 million a year," says the audit, obtained by the NDP under freedom of information.

The two main private companies that landed the job-search contracts gave generous donations to the B.C. Liberals' election campaign.

The concept behind the welfare-to-work program is sound. And it's good that the government has fixed the problems. But it's inexcusable for Richmond to just shrug off the millions of dollars that have apparently
been wasted.

Payments for dead welfare recipients is an insult to living taxpayers. The government should immediately try to get the money back.

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by Michael Smyth