Do you think readers would like to know if a well-paid foreign consul general also receives welfare benefits? Or if a sanitation worker walked into a Boston bank and used his Massachusetts welfare card to cash a $25,000 disability check? And never declared the outside income to welfare? Or if a man is legally entitled to receive a $29,000 Social Security check while serving a two-year prison sentence? Or what welfare dependency means to two women who have collected public assistance for nearly 20 years each? Stories like these and a dozen others helped bring the complex subject of welfare and welfare abuse into focus when The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence published a five-part computer-assisted series on the Massachusetts Welfare System in September. The series found Massachusetts welfare officials doing little or nothing to prevent unscrupulous people from stealing tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers and the poor. Daily circulation rose 1,000 papers above normal during the series. And requests from across the country keep trickling into the newsroom. But the juicy stories were just one small part of a long and complicated project.
The names of welfare recipients have been protected under state and federal privacy laws since the Great Depression. So when two years of welfare rolls for the Greater Lawrence area landed in our laps we started to computerize them.
Complicating matters was a 50-year-old law that makes it a criminal offense for anyone to possess welfare rolls or use them to derive statistics, and the task of deciphering the welfare department's code.
Two sets of lawyers told us the law was unconstitutional. And when a file layout was sent to us in the mail, the code was easily understood.
Welfare lists contain names, social security numbers, addresses, dates on and off public assistance, the grant amount, the type of assistance, the case workers' names and the reasons for being on welfare.
What the reader didn't see were the hundreds of hours spent inputting reams of data, the panic when software problems ate thousands of records or the cajoling that went into getting government bureaucrats to hand over computer information free of cost.
Because the lettering was too small to scan - we tried - we had to spend hundreds of hours inputting the data into a DBASE 4, version 1.5, file. We have been using DBASE for the past three years.
On at least four occasions, I was entering the 500th name, when all of a sudden, the computer froze while in the middle of the date field. Cold panic struck. The only way out was to hit the control/alt/delete buttons and reboot the system. We lost all 500 records and hours of work.
When this problem first happened, we thought it was the keyboard. So we changed to a new one. It happened a second time in the same location: The date field. Again the records were lost.
We switched computers, thinking it was a hardware problem. Finally, after the fourth time we called the Borland Hotline to see if it was a software problem. Borland purchased DBASE from Ashton Tate.
They suggested we had a "corrupt header" - the computer equivalent of scrambled eggs. The code that tells the computer where the fields are within the database had somehow become corrupted, throwing everything out of whack.
The only way around the problem was to convert the file from DBASE into ASCII format. Once that was done, the file had to be transferred back into DBASE. We also purchased a program called DSALVAGE, designed to clean up problems like the one we kept experiencing.
This problem did not always happen when I was entering data into the computer. It struck again when we transferred 500,000 records from the newsroom 386. At first the data was fine. But as we began to cut and slice, we appeared to lose half our files.
Fortunately, we backed our data up on a tape and were able to try again. Borland has still not been able to explain the inputting problem. We are now looking at other databases like FoxPro for Windows.
Once we had the welfare lists computerized we were able to match it with other databases. We knew from a previous computer-assisted project that people collecting workers' compensation often failed to report the income to the welfare department. As a result, they could earn a very good wage tax free at the expense of the taxpayers.
I spent four months negotiating with the Industrial Accident Board Commissioner to give me a computerized tape of all workers' compensation cases.
At first, the state wanted to give me just the names, dates of birth, insurance company, business, accident date, board identification number and settlement of everyone who filed a claim at the IAB. The names were worthless. I wanted the social security numbers. They were the one unique field I needed to conduct matches.
I argued that the registry of state motor vehicle uses social security numbers on most drivers' licenses. And many banks put social security numbers on deeds.
They agreed to give me the social security number if it did not come with the name and date of birth. Why not? We had all the names we needed in our welfare database. It worked.
Once the match was done, I gave the state a list of names and board identification numbers and asked for paper copies to check my findings. They had no idea what I was trying to find. The paper records gave us something to fall back on and double check our findings.
We found Greater Lawrence businesses paid more than $1.5 million in settlement claims in the last two years to welfare recipients. We also found 99 percent never declared the outside income to the welfare department as required by law.
When we asked the welfare commissioner why the state never performed such matches with workers' compensation records, he told us the two computers were not compatible. The state compensation was not where most fraud occurred.
After our series came out, the state started performing matches and found thousands of double dippers trying to beat the system.
Another ripe area was prisons.
We knew from the Essex County Sheriff that inmates in the country jail were collecting welfare benefits behind bars on a somewhat routine basis.
Four years ago, an inmate told The Eagle-Tribune how easy it was to collect welfare while serving a prison sentence. The state keeps track of prisoners through the Criminal History Systems Board. But records cost $25 per inmate, making that cost exclusive.
We did have, however, our own criminal systems history board. Several years ago, I asked our court reporter to save disks. I converted the files into a database making a match possible.
In two separate interviews both the Massachusetts welfare commissioner and the state's top fraud prosecutor told us that computer matches were impossible. They both cited the lack of a central registry. Our series showed them how to perform a match.
The fallout from the series has been tremendous. U.S. Senator Herbert Kohl, D-Wisconsin, asked for a copy. Two members of Congress are proposing legislation banning inmates from collecting Social Security while behind bars.
Gov. William F. Weld came to the newsroom and revoked a law making it illegal for welfare officials to provide U.S. Immigration and Naturalization with information to apprehend criminally convicted aliens. And welfare reform has a good chance of getting through the state legislature.
If you would like more information on deciphering welfare codes, welfare data in general, privacy issues we dealt with, the pitfalls of DBASE or a copy of our series, please call me at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence. My phone number is (508) 685-1000, ext. 189.
Do you think readers would like to know if a well-paid foreign consul general also receives welfare benefits? Or if a sanitation worker walked into a Boston bank and used his Massachusetts welfare card to cash a $25,000 disability check? And never declared the outside income to welfare? Or if a man is legally entitled to receive a $29,000 Social Security check while serving a two-year prison sentence? Or what welfare dependency means to two women who have collected public assistance for nearly 20 years each? Stories like these and a dozen others helped bring the complex subject of welfare and welfare abuse into focus when The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence published a five-part computer-assisted series on the Massachusetts Welfare System in September. The series found Massachusetts welfare officials doing little or nothing to prevent unscrupulous people from stealing tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers and the poor. Daily circulation rose 1,000 papers above normal during the series. And requests from across the country keep trickling into the newsroom. But the juicy stories were just one small part of a long and complicated project.
The names of welfare recipients have been protected under state and federal privacy laws since the Great Depression. So when two years of welfare rolls for the Greater Lawrence area landed in our laps we started to computerize them.
Complicating matters was a 50-year-old law that makes it a criminal offense for anyone to possess welfare rolls or use them to derive statistics, and the task of deciphering the welfare department's code.
Two sets of lawyers told us the law was unconstitutional. And when a file layout was sent to us in the mail, the code was easily understood.
Welfare lists contain names, social security numbers, addresses, dates on and off public assistance, the grant amount, the type of assistance, the case workers' names and the reasons for being on welfare.
What the reader didn't see were the hundreds of hours spent inputting reams of data, the panic when software problems ate thousands of records or the cajoling that went into getting government bureaucrats to hand over computer information free of cost.
Because the lettering was too small to scan - we tried - we had to spend hundreds of hours inputting the data into a DBASE 4, version 1.5, file. We have been using DBASE for the past three years.
On at least four occasions, I was entering the 500th name, when all of a sudden, the computer froze while in the middle of the date field. Cold panic struck. The only way out was to hit the control/alt/delete buttons and reboot the system. We lost all 500 records and hours of work.
When this problem first happened, we thought it was the keyboard. So we changed to a new one. It happened a second time in the same location: The date field. Again the records were lost.
We switched computers, thinking it was a hardware problem. Finally, after the fourth time we called the Borland Hotline to see if it was a software problem. Borland purchased DBASE from Ashton Tate.
They suggested we had a "corrupt header" - the computer equivalent of scrambled eggs. The code that tells the computer where the fields are within the database had somehow become corrupted, throwing everything out of whack.
The only way around the problem was to convert the file from DBASE into ASCII format. Once that was done, the file had to be transferred back into DBASE. We also purchased a program called DSALVAGE, designed to clean up problems like the one we kept experiencing.
This problem did not always happen when I was entering data into the computer. It struck again when we transferred 500,000 records from the newsroom 386. At first the data was fine. But as we began to cut and slice, we appeared to lose half our files.
Fortunately, we backed our data up on a tape and were able to try again. Borland has still not been able to explain the inputting problem. We are now looking at other databases like FoxPro for Windows.
Once we had the welfare lists computerized we were able to match it with other databases. We knew from a previous computer-assisted project that people collecting workers' compensation often failed to report the income to the welfare department. As a result, they could earn a very good wage tax free at the expense of the taxpayers.
I spent four months negotiating with the Industrial Accident Board Commissioner to give me a computerized tape of all workers' compensation cases.
At first, the state wanted to give me just the names, dates of birth, insurance company, business, accident date, board identification number and settlement of everyone who filed a claim at the IAB. The names were worthless. I wanted the social security numbers. They were the one unique field I needed to conduct matches.
I argued that the registry of state motor vehicle uses social security numbers on most drivers' licenses. And many banks put social security numbers on deeds.
They agreed to give me the social security number if it did not come with the name and date of birth. Why not? We had all the names we needed in our welfare database. It worked.
Once the match was done, I gave the state a list of names and board identification numbers and asked for paper copies to check my findings. They had no idea what I was trying to find. The paper records gave us something to fall back on and double check our findings.
We found Greater Lawrence businesses paid more than $1.5 million in settlement claims in the last two years to welfare recipients. We also found 99 percent never declared the outside income to the welfare department as required by law.
When we asked the welfare commissioner why the state never performed such matches with workers' compensation records, he told us the two computers were not compatible. The state compensation was not where most fraud occurred.
After our series came out, the state started performing matches and found thousands of double dippers trying to beat the system.
Another ripe area was prisons.
We knew from the Essex County Sheriff that inmates in the country jail were collecting welfare benefits behind bars on a somewhat routine basis.
Four years ago, an inmate told The Eagle-Tribune how easy it was to collect welfare while serving a prison sentence. The state keeps track of prisoners through the Criminal History Systems Board. But records cost $25 per inmate, making that cost exclusive.
We did have, however, our own criminal systems history board. Several years ago, I asked our court reporter to save disks. I converted the files into a database making a match possible.
In two separate interviews both the Massachusetts welfare commissioner and the state's top fraud prosecutor told us that computer matches were impossible. They both cited the lack of a central registry. Our series showed them how to perform a match.
The fallout from the series has been tremendous. U.S. Senator Herbert Kohl, D-Wisconsin, asked for a copy. Two members of Congress are proposing legislation banning inmates from collecting Social Security while behind bars.
Gov. William F. Weld came to the newsroom and revoked a law making it illegal for welfare officials to provide U.S. Immigration and Naturalization with information to apprehend criminally convicted aliens. And welfare reform has a good chance of getting through the state legislature.
If you would like more information on deciphering welfare codes, welfare data in general, privacy issues we dealt with, the pitfalls of DBASE or a copy of our series, please call me at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence. My phone number is (508) 685-1000, ext. 189.