About “Fraud of the Day”

Most people play by the rules. They pay their taxes. If eligible for a tax break or other government benefit, they request only that to which they are entitled. Then there are others, fraudsters—they don’t play by the rules. They are scamming the government. At a time when federal, state, and local governments are struggling to pay teachers, law enforcement officials, and fire fighters, fraudsters are stealing taxpayers’ hard earned dollars and pocketing it.

Larry Benson understands that in order for federal, state, and local government agencies to combat fraud, they must understand how fraud is perpetrated and how their colleagues and industry experts are helping to stop it. This site is dedicated to providing articles about how fraud is occurring across government and insight from industry experts on how to prevent it.

Here’s how it started: Larry read a news article about how the government was being defrauded. He was angry, frustrated and had a few thoughts of his own on the topic so he forwarded the article and his comments onto some friends. This was especially frustrating since his colleague, Andy Bucholz is frequently called upon to speak about how people defraud the government in the tax and revenue and social services arenas and to provide solutions to stop it. He started looking around and realized that there were stories on the Internet every day about these topics and any number of ways people were defrauding the government—tax refund fraud, homestead exemption fraud, unemployment fraud, retirement fund fraud, food stamp fraud…just to name a few.

As he continued to distribute these “Fraud of the Day” articles and commentary onto his friends and colleagues, they forwarded them to their contacts. Soon, Inspectors General and government employees involved in programs that were being defrauded began asking him to add them and their staff members to his distribution list. They wanted to learn more about how people were defrauding the government in other jurisdictions so they could take action in their own.

Larry realized that—while there were a lot of stories out there about fraud—there wasn’t one single forum dedicated to educating government officials about all the ways that fraud is perpetrated against government and the solutions to stop it, so this site was established. He also decided to call on experts for their insight. When you visit the “Fraud of the Day,” you’ll find Larry’s commentary; links to other news, events, and resources pertaining to government fraud; and video commentary from tax fraud expert, Andy Bucholz. We also have added some international stories, primarily based in the UK, for our readers to learn that fraud is also a global issue.

We hope you learn something today about fraud in government and solutions to prevent it.