The department that the public turns to when they feel they\u2019ve been victims of fraud has been singled out by auditors. A report finds\u00a0the Division of Public Assistance Fraud is coming up short in a few areas.<\/p>\n\n

Thousands of claims relating to Medicaid and food stamp fraud come into Florida\u2019s Department of Financial Services every year.\u00a0An audit from July 2011 to January 2013 recommended some changes for the Division of Public Assistance Fraud.<\/p>\n

The Division runs 7 regional offices throughout the state. The audit found regional investigators are overrun with cases – more than one thousand for every investigator in places like Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Auditors say high case loads increased the risk of claims taking too long.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could always use more. Over the last 5 or 6 years the division of Public Assistance Fraud was cut in half by budget reductions,” said Division Director Jack Heacock. Heacock agreed that more staff was necessary.<\/p>\n

The audit also found the Divison of Public Fraud Assistance was spending nearly $8 million dollars and only recovering a little over $3 million.<\/p>\n

Representatives from Florida TaxWatch say a higher return would be nice, but the program is preventing more fraud, and more money from being taken.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou obviously want to recapture more than you\u2019re spending, that\u2019s just fundamental business decisions and that may not always be the case. But the deterrent effect has got to be phenomenal,” said TaxWatch CEO Dominic Calabro.<\/p>\n

Heacock said the number doesn’t tell the whole story.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur division has more than simply restitution to hang its hat on,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Heacock says the amount of money recovered during the audit period doesn’t show the overall success of the program. From 2012 to 2013, numbers from the CFO\u2019s office show more than 26 million dollars of potentially fraudulent benefits were withheld.<\/p>\n

The Division\u2019s director disagreed with claim times taking too long. He said a majority of claims on average take 120 days or less to complete. Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater agreed with all of the audits findings and the department is currently implementing changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The department that the public turns to when they feel they\u2019ve been victims of fraud has been singled out by auditors. A report finds\u00a0the Division of Public Assistance Fraud is coming up short in a few areas. Thousands of claims relating to Medicaid and food stamp fraud come into Florida\u2019s Department of Financial Services every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20828,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823\/revisions\/20828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}