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Government programs, from food stamps to Medicare, don't have unusually high fraud rates -- and the culprits are usually managers and executives, not "welfare queens."
I’ll never forget the day after Christmas 2005, standing alongside my car, which was tilted at a 45-degree angle in the ditch that passed for a curb alongside a pitted, crumbling road. As the sky darkened, not a
light glowed anywhere within sight; neither a single police car nor any other sign of public authority appeared for hour after gloomy hour. I was in post-Katrina New Orleans.I’d been asked by the State of Louisiana to advise on the design of programs to aid homeowners dispossessed by the hurricane -- what ultimately became known as the “Road Home” program.
I don’t claim to know much about housing policy, but I do know about the ways governments screw things up. I quickly recognized a classic case in the making.
The receding waters in the Gulf had left behind the conditions for a perfect storm of fraud: hundreds of thousands of poor people clamoring for billions of dollars of federal aid that needed to get out the door as quickly as possible. As a result, post-Katrina discussions were shaped by the perceived need to ensure multiple safeguards and to move slowly in releasing the intended aid.
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