Friday, January 7, 2022

Food Stamp Fraud Busted

 The Mississippi Department of Human Services issued the following statement. 

A Desoto County, Miss. resident has been arrested for SNAP fraud following an investigation conducted by the Investigations Division of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS).

 

Investigators found that Candice Ballard received an over issuance of SNAP benefits in the amount of $30,072.00 due to Ballard fraudulently receiving benefits by her failing to report income and household composition accurately.

 

Due to the substantial amount of overpayment and the evidence of alleged fraud found during the investigation, the case was turned over to Desoto County District Attorney to be presented to the Grand Jury for criminal prosecution. The Desoto County District Attorney secured an indictment on December 8, 2021, which was later executed on December 15, 2021, by the Desoto County Sheriff’s Office.

 

The case was investigated by Brett Estes and Sean Hildenbrand of the MDHS Investigations Division.

 

The Investigations Division is a subset of the MDHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which was created in August 2018 and charged with detecting, preventing, and deterring fraud, waste, and abuse within the agency. OIG has been responsible for recovering millions of dollars in SNAP overpayments.

 

“This investigation and ultimate prosecution demonstrates the controls we have in place to identify, investigate, and eliminate fraud in our programs,” MDHS Executive Director Robert G. “Bob” Anderson said. “This is also a great example of cooperation between our county office, investigations team, and local law enforcement.”

 

Suspected fraud can be reported to MDHS online any time by submitting the MDHS Fraud Tip Form at https://www.mdhs.ms.gov/report-fraud/, calling the Fraud Tip Line at 1-(800)-299-6905, or email at fraud@mdhs.ms.gov.

 


41 comments:

Anonymous said...

The entire program is a scam. People need to get off their ass and work. If you don't work, you don't eat. It is really that simple

Anonymous said...

$30k+? How long had this been going on?

Anonymous said...

@9:13 - We are the richest country in the world. There is no reason we can’t help people who are struggling. It’s the decent and human thing to do especially when children are involved.

Anonymous said...

9:24 : Yes. Agreed. Still, should we be helping someone working who used SNAP to cover her Cheeto addiction ? You know what 9:13 is getting at but at the end of the day there will never be a job for everyone willing. A bloated population insures that. We should feed our kids and elderly.....but we simply haven't evolved past stupid.

Anonymous said...

9:24, FYI.

https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/richest-countries-in-the-world

Anonymous said...

9:24. Point out in the article that this person did this solely for "The Children". Second question is where can we meet so you can buy my lunch.

Anonymous said...

@9:24 - Richest country in the world??? $29T in debt and climbing!!!

Anonymous said...

United States of America spends trillions of dollars on military weapons that will never be used. And you’re tripping about giving free food away to people who need food?
Please.

Anonymous said...

Attn 9:37 We have to spend trillions on military equipment because this administration chooses to abandon the equipment so our sworn enemies can continue to update their effectiveness with our armaments.

Anonymous said...

Once again 9:37, please point out, in this article, where this is about giving free food away to people who need food. This is about an individual not following rules and or manipulating the system for personal gain. Again, about that free lunch date you need to keep.

Anonymous said...

tip of the iceberg

Anonymous said...

I am really tired of being in line at the grocery when I see the person ahead of me buying chips, cookies, etc. with a legit designer handbag, their hair and nails "did", and then they pay with a SNAP card, one of which actually annouced it was a SNAP card. And to top it off, they head to their Lexus or Mercedes....Then I see some little old lady having to put things back because she can't afford it all. Frankly, I'm amazed they caught this person. I will be really impressed if there are any significant consequences for her. Jail time comes to mind along with being banned from the program for life...but that's just me.

Anonymous said...

9:37 : And still charges the folks running that equipment to eat. Like I said...we haven't evolved beyond stupid. We wouldn't have a "food" problem if the population were less stupid. We are a bloated un-evolved peoples and only time can fix it.

Anonymous said...

Should have investigated MDHS internally. Those low level Division Directors and Program Administrators can see when the recipients are committing fraud but when their own are committing criminal acts they turn a blind eye. Example John Davis.

Yea we see you made an arrest, the Legislature is in session, good publicity! Let them know you’re on the job!

Oh Snap! said...

Give a man a fish...

Anonymous said...

@9:24 children born out of wedlock on purpose for the sole purpose of getting more handouts. Great system.

Anonymous said...

January 7, 2022 at 10:41 AM--

Sounds a lot like Reagan's "Welfare Queen" that was made up bullshit that never existed.

Anonymous said...

10:41: I'll agree with your comment and raise you one. If you're receiving free or discounted tuition at one of the local private schools for need-based or "diversity" reasons, don't be dropping the kids off in a Benz. Carry your weight like everyone else and I don't care what you drive.

Speaking of weight, I'm all for social safety nets, but we're one of the only countries in the world whose poor people have an obesity problem.

Krusatyr said...

@ 9:24 (JFP?)
Can't socialists thrive on dog tacos, zoo critters, roasted rodents and nutrition of love for collectivist dogma?

Anonymous said...

@10:51AM
What are you even talking about? Food isn’t the only problem. Poverty, period. As I said beforehand, in America, the lack of food should be the absolute last problem that anyone endures. IDGAF if they’re evolved, revolved, bloated or dehydrated...FOOD should never be a problem for anyone living in America.

Anonymous said...

January 7, 2022 at 9:37 AM

Learn to speak Russian or Chinese if we didn't spend money on defense.

Anonymous said...

@11:54AM
Doesn’t matter if they’re born out of wedlock or whatever. Humans shouldn’t starve in America, period. We live in a country where millions of dollars of food is thrown into the trash on a daily basis. We live on a planet where the nations spend trillions of dollars to land robots and go-carts on Mars. Bezos spent $25 billion recently to orbit earth in the same amount of time it takes to bake chicken.

Anonymous said...

@9:47am - The US has spent trillions on the industrial military complex for many decades (corporate welfare). Are you really arguing that an administration that hasn’t been in office for a year yet is responsible for this? I know there are some uneducated folks in Mississippi, but that’s a pretty far stretch. Fits the “everything is Biden’s fault” narrative though, no matter how far fetched, so I suppose I can’t be surprised.

Anonymous said...

@12:55... Have you ever seen a skinny person on welfare?

Anonymous said...

12:55 : But governments at least try to feed folks. The combined wealth of 5 people just in this country could likely end hunger. And I don't mean by taxing them for the funds. I mean THEY could pull it off with a months worth of money. So why don't they do it ? Who knows but it really shows us just how evolved we really are.

Krusatyr said...

1:45, 12:59, 12:55, 9:37

People are happier if they earn their way.

Ever get nauseated thinking what it costs for a big diesel school bus to deliver 'free' lunches to school kids' homes while schools are closed to accommodate unionized socialist JPS teachers who are getting paid in full to sit home and use Zoom occasionally?

I took homemade sandwiches to school for 12 years and survived on my own economically prepared food once a day in college, and often worked nights. Except for true, rare, exceptional hardship cases, we should make people work to feed themselves.

Anonymous said...

This poor state has been the poorest for a long time. Our conservative government has been running this program and the state into the ground for too long. It's all the fault of the current administration. Faulty programs ran by faulty leaders. When will these voters wake up? Looks to be ran no different than those idiots running hinds county and the city of jackson

Anonymous said...

Wow Mississippi has the worst elected officials. How smart can the citizens be to keep voting to be in last place? I see Mississippians who live in the worst state in the union punch down on municipalities within to the state for the "who's living the worst award". News flash, the whole state is a loser, not just Jackson. Madison County and Rankin County competing for the who sucks less award SMH

Anonymous said...

Has anyone ever seen a skinny Mississippian on welfare? I'll wait.

Anonymous said...

@12:59AM
There are uneducated people everywhere, especially in the comment sections of blogs. Hence your reply.

Anonymous said...

@1:30PM
I don’t know anyone on welfare.

Anonymous said...

@12:51PM
You’re brainwashed. I hate to see it.

Anonymous said...

generational welfare and encouraging singe women to have bangies is evil. I support more true short term welfare for those who no fault of their own need help for a limited period of time. All needs to be locally controlled and out in the open.

Anonymous said...

2:56 : I agree . My point is that even those that try can't always make it . If everyone was a plumber....

Anonymous said...

I would be shocked if 50% of the "food stamps" issued are spent for the purpose they were so nobly intended.

Anonymous said...

Did it ever occur to any of you that a lot of people in this state are (under) employed and thus still on welfare? That’s why this “red”state has not and will not implement any type of welfare reform, regardless of how much Rs say the hate welfare. They know it would hurt a lot of rural white republican voters as well.

10:41,were they also carrying gold bars and pulling a yacht? Was the “little old lady” wearing tattered clothes and in her deathbed? Nice try but that is so cliche and old at this point. Heard it before. Next time get the persons license plate and report them.

Fact Checker said...

It wasn't a Lexus or Mercedes; it was a Ferrari or Lamborghini. Get your facts right!

Frank Griffin said...

Candace Ballard rips off the SNAP program. Here come the racist pigs lapping up the slop. Soooooey, pig!! Why don't you focus the same amount of hatred on Lamar Adams and Nancy New and John Davis. Talk about a water tower's fill of slop.

Honors to Bob Anderson. Now we have Shad AND Bob. And Jackson's radical mayor has thanked the Feds for coming to the rescue. Good things happening? Looks like it.

Anonymous said...

Sounds a lot like Reagan's "Welfare Queen" that was made up bullshit that never existed

Actually, she did exist.

Her name was Linda Taylor was born in 1926 as Martha Louise White in Golddust, Tennessee to a white woman named Lydia Mooney White. Her father was black. She had been conceived in Alabama, where, at the time, sexual relations between white and black people were illegal and punishable by prison time. The family frequently lied about her race, as telling the truth could have made her mother guilty of a felony.

Martha grew up the child of itinerant sharecroppers who made little money and were often devastated by droughts and floods. On top of the financial deprivation, she was often made to feel like an outsider in her own family because of her race, never allowed in her uncle’s home and kept out of family functions. She was expelled from an all-white school at age six and didn’t make it past the second grade.

She gave birth to her first child in 1940 around the age of 14 and would go on to give birth to four more over her lifetime. It was around then that she left home and began her own itinerant lifestyle, moving first to a mostly black neighborhood in Oakland, California. She quickly accumulated a criminal record mostly thanks to local laws meant to control “loose women” and the spread of venereal disease; her first charge was in Seattle for disorderly conduct in 1943, when she was branded “a promiscuous woman,” Levin reports. (Her male partners were never charged.) While she did appear to make attempts at formal employment, she was also at a disadvantage. Racism had limited her education, and racism also limited her employment opportunities, even if she often leaned into racial fluidity or even assumed a white identity.

She certainly perpetrated welfare fraud, showing up to aid offices and describing hardships she hadn’t experienced and children she didn’t have to get expedited checks from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, the cash welfare program now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Her system “preyed on the sympathies of overworked bureaucrats and exploited rules designed to help the vulnerable and destitute,” Levin reports. “Most of the time, it worked.” She used a rotating cast of aliases to get those checks, as well as to perpetrate other frauds in other programs and private systems like life insurance.

She may very well have also suffered from mental illness. At her first trial over welfare fraud, her attorney asserted that she “was incapable of knowing whether or not she was telling the truth” and had her evaluated by psychiatrists. In 1978, three of her lawyers said the same and two psychiatrists found she was “psychotic.” A public defender representing her in 1994 similarly told a judge she couldn’t partake in her own defense because “she was vague, tangential, and related facts which were extremely improbable, if not impossible.”

Anonymous said...

"Sounds a lot like Reagan's "Welfare Queen" that was made up bullshit that never existed.

January 7, 2022 at 12:00 PM"

Never existed? The name she was using at the time was Linda Taylor - she had a number of aliases. She went to trial and then to prison in 1977. It's an interesting story you can find in the archives of the Chicago Tribune and other papers, or with a google search.

Anonymous said...

Actually no I didn't fraud the state of ms nor am I obese. My drug addict, abusive husband left me with no money and 6 kids. I applied for food stamps. 4 months later my house burned down. It was a total loss. Ex was fighting me for custody. My parents had to pay for an attorney. Went through that for 5 years. Insurance didn't give a dime for our contents lost in the house fire. They paid rent for 6 months while the ex managed to have 3 of my children removed from my home. First ex husband owed me $28,000 in back child support, which MDHS was perfectly aware of but did nothing. I put my 3 children living at home on food stamps. MDHS knew exactly who was in my home. I got remarried, we had a baby, he worked for Panola County Sheriff’s Department making $24,000 a year. He tried the best he could to support us and help. 16 year old daughter had a baby. Now 4 kids plus grandbaby in home. Got evicted from home and before that the rental home was sold out from under us. Lived in a hotel for a month. Oldest daughter graduated. 15 and 17 year old decided they wanted to live with felon dad. They moved to Starkville, ms. He is the one that owes $28,000 in back child support. He states these false accusations. The news doesn't tell the whole story. Don't judge. I haven't been on food stamps since 2019. The state is accusing me from 2016 until 2020. That is false. Guilty until proven innocent apparently.



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