The point of public pensions is that government employees be able to maintain a standard of living that they’ve earned through years of hard work and dedication to the state, throughout their retirement. It is in no way meant to act as an estate asset or an inheritance that lives on after their death. The Albany Times Union writes about one such case, in which a 58-year-old Atlanta man illegally collected his mother’s pension for nearly four years after she had passed away in New York.
The mother had spent much of her life working for the New York Department of Corrections, making her eligible to collect a $3,500 monthly state pension, to begin on the date of her retirement and end on the date of her death. After she died, in 2009, her middle-aged son was made the executor of her estate. (We’ve done enough of these to know that age doesn’t necessarily come with a moral compass.)But instead of reporting his mother’s death to the New York Retirement System, as required by law, he allowed the state to continue depositing her monthly pension payments into a joint account to which he had access. Between March of 2009 and December of 2013, siphoned off more than $200,000 in pension payments that he knew were being fraudulently issued to his deceased mother. (“My mother? Oh, she’s indisposed. Can I take a message?”)
New York doesn’t take these types of crimes lying down. Its ‘Operation Integrity’ initiative, which assembles investigative resources from the Attorney General’s and the Comptroller’s Office of Investigations to weed out the waste and abuse of public funds, has produced countless convictions and more than $11 million in restitution. In fact, the ‘Operation Integrity’ investigation of this particular pension fraud left the scheming son indicted for third-degree grand larceny by a state grand jury and incarcerated since June of last year. (With cooperation from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, where the son was residing.)
Later, an Albany County Court judge issued the defendant a deferred sentence of three to six years in state prison and sentenced him to parole. Facing a civil lawsuit from the New York State and Local Employees Retirement System, the defendant agreed to a judgment that requires him to pay the agency $204,315.
This man exploited his dead mother to steal money from the government—hundreds of thousands of dollars that was never meant for a deceased person, who’s probably rolling over in her grave.
The post Death May Not Do Us Part appeared first on Fraud of the Day.