In Fraud Case, DHS Admits It OK’d 90% of a Set of Fee Waivers
It should have denied them
By David North on December 26, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security has, in effect, pleaded guilty to reducing its own income by failing to reject 90 percent of a set of some 320 fraudulent fee waiver applications in a new and interesting fraud case. An estimated quarter of a million dollars was involved, though that total is not mentioned in the release.
The headline of the ICE press release, of course, puts a more positive take on the events: “HSI El Paso arrests local woman charged with defrauding the U.S. government, benefits applicants”.
(All the press releases assume that the reader knows that HSI stands for Homeland Security Investigations, a division within ICE.)
What is interesting about the case is that it relates to an obscure kind of fraud, one that I have not encountered before. The arrested woman, Perla Vidalez, was a form-preparer in the immigration business, and she managed more than 320 times to cheat both her clients, presumably including a lot of illegal aliens, and DHS simultaneously.
What she did was to complete applications for immigration benefits for the individuals, collect the fees that they owed DHS for the benefit in question, and then, unknown to the clients, file papers for them seeking to waive the $600 - $900 in fees for the benefit in question. Vidalez kept the fees and paid the government nothing, since it had waived the fees. The number 320 times $750 for the average fee equals $240,000.
https://cis.org/North/Fraud-Case-DHS-Admits-It-OKd-90-Set-Fee-Waivers
