So, at the very least, five or six agencies chased dozens of witnesses, nine LLCs and general corporations, an untold number of other allegedly fake companies, a long list of bank accounts, a countywide network of real estate, and a series of credit card statements, the latter producing detailed statements in the complaint about the luxury goods Soofer allegedly purchased using public funds. His wife apparently has some quite nice Hermes sandals that Los Angeles taxpayers bought her, if the FBI is correct. I attempted to get more information from the city controller who started the ball rolling, but his office has yet to respond to questions. I’ve never once found that the FBI answers questions about its investigations, so I haven’t bothered to ask them about it.
Read the complaint linked above and form your own conclusion, but an educated guess is that it’s a description of hundreds of hours of investigation, and maybe more. It continues, and they’re clearly still digging.
Now, Soofer allegedly represents about $10 million in local fraud, and Mehmet Oz says that just the category of medical fraud in just that one county probably amounts to about $3.5 billion a year. In Minneapolis, Nick Shirley is visiting single addresses listed in public records as the office for multiple businesses that can’t actually be found there, and the X user who posts as Data Republican is suggesting that some single addresses in the city are actually the address of record for hundreds of potentially fraudulent businesses.
Do the math in your head: How many cops, doing how many hours of investigation, will it take to unravel tens of billions of dollars of overlapping fraud in government-funded health care, transportation, daycare, and homeless services nonprofits, in California and Minnesota and wherever else large numbers of nonprofits chase a massive pool of federal, state, and local public funds?
Americans are quite lightly policed, and should be. //
Our police do their work at the margins and are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.
The first place to stop fraud is with a healthy culture. The second place to stop it is in a limited government that doesn’t offer a bunch of free cash for thieves to steal. The third solution, investigations and arrests, is clumsy, slow, and likely to prove grossly inadequate. //
The more we undermine the first culture and import the second, the more we’re going to foster public services fraud. That’s not what we want to do.
