Dear Friends... PPUF would like to offer this recent blog post 

Reprint from HesterPrynne

Another Day, Another Faux Welfare Fraud Story

July 14, 2013

I sure didn’t plan to write three posts in a row about our Legislature’s fixation on welfare fraud. After the second of the posts, in which the Senate agreed with the House of Representatives that Massachusetts, alone among the 50 states, ought to require photo ID’s on welfare EBT cards (cost/benefit analyses showing that photo ID’s do very little to deter fraud be damned), I thought we might be done for a while.

I was wrong.

No sooner had Governor Patrick accepted the Legislature’s photo ID plan (along with a feeble plea that the usefulness of photo ID’s be reviewed in three years) than State Representative Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton), who seems to regard public assistance in the same way that Carrie Nation regarded alcohol, was holding a press conference on yet another faux scandal: some Massachusetts households receiving cash assistance (specifically, 43 of the 83,000 recipient households) have balances on their EBT cards in excess of $1500. “Clearly, fraud is happening,” she told the State House News Service. Her alarm bell was quickly broadcast by the Herald.

How, other than through the fraudulent behavior of the recipients, could such high balances have been reached, she and the Herald asked rhetorically. Well, for one possible answer, we need only to return to the Herald, which also ran a story last week about the glitches in the new computer system that distributes unemployment insurance benefits in the state. The paper told the story of a laid-off construction worker from Medford, whose $674 in week unemployment benefits unaccountably disappeared during the transition to the new system. “The system is inept and the people who run the system are inept,” he fumed, much to the Herald’s delight. But when that worker’s problem is resolved in say, a week or two, he will also receive the weeks of back benefits that were improperly withheld in the first place. At that point, the balance on his card will very likely top $1500 and we may then expect Representative O’Connell’s fury to be visited upon him, because “clearly, fraud is happening.”

A small beacon of hope that welfare wrathfulness may be running its course: the editorial board of theTaunton Gazette (Representative O’Connell’s hometown newspaper) suggested this week that there may be reasonable explanations for the (very few) high balance welfare cases and recommended that the Representative “stop, look and listen before she takes more cheap shots at the wrong targets, going as far as calling them criminals.” Let’s hear it for cooler heads, especially cooler heads from Taunton.

SIDEBAR: On the same day as her press conference on high-balance EBT cards, Representative O’Connell made an unsuccessful pitch on behalf of former State Representative Daniel Webster, who was seeking a seat on the Republican State Committee. “Dan Webster was a colleague of mine. He was a fighter up here at the State House. He helped me a lot and I think he has something to offer,” she said in support of his losing candidacy. Among the things Webster had to offer, which led to his defeat in the 2012 elections, were a trio of reprimands, two from the Supreme Judicial Court for misuse of client funds and one from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance for reporting violations. In Webster’s case, fraud was NOT happening. Clearly.

Join us at SHARE A LAUGH on Thursday, May 16th at 7:30

This Thursday, May 16th, is the time for you to SHARE A LAUGH at the Davis Square Theater to support Community Works!

Click HERE to buy tickets to SHARE A LAUGH!

PPUF is a long-standing member of Community Works, a portfolio of 34 local community-based social justice organizations working to build the human capacity that is vital to addressing the challenges facing our neighborhoods, our communities and our planet.

More public outcry about the Emergency Assistance shelter crisis

On Tuesday, April 9, our staff attended a press conference at the Massachusetts State House on the impact of the current Emergency Assistance (EA) shelter regulations on homeless children and families.

At the event, the Mass Law Reform Institute (MLRI) released a new report on the homelessness crisis, "Out in the Cold: Homeless Children in Crisis in Massachusetts," and welcomed speakers who, due to the new regulations, were forced to sleep in "places not fit for human habitation" before receiving EA. Speakers included a woman who, nine months pregnant and with a four-year-old child, was denied shelter and thus slept on a public beach in order to get the official verification (from the authorities who discovered the family) to prove that she and her family were truly homeless under the Department of Housing and Community Development rules.

PPUF concurs with MLRI and countless other human service organizations that families should not have to sleep in "places not fit for human habitation" in order to receive EA shelter. 

At the event,  MLRI proposed a simple solution to all of the EA hubbub:

"The solution is to amend the language in line item 7004-0101 to ensure that families who have no where else to go are placed in shelter when they are at 'at imminent risk of staying in a place not meant for human habitation...'"

See http://www.mlri.org/outinthecold.pdf for the full report released at yesterday's press conference.

A compelling look at the children affected by the EA housing crisis.

This video, published on January 27, explains how homeless children are now being denied shelter in Massachusetts, and offers suggestions about what you can do to help.

 

Tax help is here!

Tax season is upon us again. If you're scrambling to file your tax returns, and you make $50,000 or less, call the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at 866-833-2823 or visit http://www.bostonabcd.org/eitc-tax-assistance-2012.aspx# to locate a tax return assistance location.