Need to look deeper at the social security fraud - of Somali's - as once someone dies, the death notice is issued and this ends the social security benefits.
Somali's are a special case - once they retire in social security they move back to Somalia and a family member send their funds to Somalia each month.
When they die in Somalia, the SS checks keep coming and the family members have a second source of income. There are press reports recently that there does not seem to be many old age deaths in the Somali community compared to the rest of the country.
Where your analysis is wrong is that you are measuring convictions - these Somali's that die in Somalia will never be convicted.
If what you describe is actually true (which is unlikely on anything close to a generalizable scale since returnees tend to be economically active and not simply going to retire in Somalia), it's still easily actionable fraud and a second year law student knows enough to bring an indictment. Fraud is difficult to defend in trial since the most common defenses are affirmative ones - which involve admitting to the conduct, and defense attorneys will tell you that it puts you on the back foot since jurors stop listening once the defendant admits to the conduct quite often. Easy plea bargains are catnip for AUSAs and there's no reason why they'd hold off when the operation relies on someone here being the accomplice.
Of course, the actual issue is that since the largest chunk of immigrants arrived in the mid 90s, only a limited number of the community has been here, gainfully employed, and are even eligible to receive social security. Older immigrants have a harder time finding employment and the younger ones would be hitting retirement age around now or in the next few years. It's far more likely that there's a decent amount of remittances sent instead of an actual flood of people retiring to Somalia and being able to carry on a fraudulent scheme long enough to be notable. Perhaps in isolation, but good luck finding enough altruistic elderly naturalized citizens willing to retire to Somalia to die early in order to posthumously defraud the US government to make it into something organized.
Not to mention that this can only be small time in the grand scheme of frauds that are committed anyway. Brett Favre was personally able to divert 7+ million TANF block grant funds from Mississippi. Four people in Florida defrauded about the same amount as the total alleged in Minnesota.
And there's also a ton of activities that are classified as fraud but really wouldn't fit the colloquial concept. Wire fraud is basically a catch-all since it's hilariously easy to prove. DOJ counts data breaches as fraud even when there's no indication that the data was actually used for fraud or even sold on. My guess is that every American's PII has been leaked somewhere, alongside those of many countries in Europe. Pretty much the entire population of the Netherlands and the UK certainly. Taking away the conflation of "potential fraud", there's still a ton of fraud, since block grants, medicaid billing, contractor, and really any time the federal government divvies out money, there's opportunity. The number in isolation appears big but in the ecosystem it's not since we're talking about hundreds of billions in fraud that we know of in total. How do you fix that? The federal government can stop dishing out block grants and other subsidies, instead of blaming people who neither voted for the programs nor benefit disproportionately from it. Adding law enforcement is really its own fraud - it's basically a welfare program for cops, and they have no incentive to speed things along. The war on drugs is easily the single biggest welfare fraud ever perpetuated, take issue with that first perhaps?
"If what you describe is actually true (which is unlikely on anything close to a generalizable scale since returnees tend to be economically active and not simply going to retire in Somalia)" To which I say you have no idea of the Somali community and I do and I many going home when they hit 62. So, how does one know when they die? By some estimates 500 billion of SS and other benefits are fraud - and millions of people are involved. As our country runs out of the ability to service our debt, what then?
I’d like to remind you that communities don’t make retirement decisions, individuals do. Even if the trend in this case goes completely against what has been observed and recorded for naturalized citizens in developing nations since, well, when we had an immigration system at all (1882), but also, we’re talking about Somali-Americans, not Somalis. They have to pay taxes, their status is audited for the very danger you believe to be outsized, and you should read through the SSA’s OIG reports if you want to learn about the safeguards: https://oig.ssa.gov/audit-reports/
That and the fact that it’s next to impossible to get to Somalia right now with Al-Shabab taking over large pockets of the country again are all good reasons why someone established in the US have little reason to retire to a place where active unrest and terrorist groups are operating and America, once again for some reason, is bombing. If America is bombing, you don’t want to be the American on the ground, do you? The dead cannot inform anyone of their death, but everything from tax forms to consular investigations will indicate the fact. Especially since there are, at last count, under 700 US passport holders in Somalia, including the younger who are working. The billions of fraud is an aggregate total, not the Somalis.
And frankly, social security is a ponzi scheme anyway. The program would be considered a fraudulent scheme without the imprimatur of the government of the US. I personally would like to see it phased out sooner than later since keeping put the ponzi in the long run will not result in much worse outcomes. The best way to stop fraud is to not create the opportunity or reason to do so. Your current contributions aren’t being saved for you but are doled out to recipients today anyway. I don’t expect any benefits at all and will not collect any that are available to me. You want the debt serviced? Going after Somali-Americans will do as much good as DOGE did in nibbling at the very edges, except with even less of an impact. The problem exists in the totality, singling out a very small groupd of minorities ain’t doing anything and can hardly be taken as a good faith effort all things considered. Entitlements, foreign wars, the police-welfare system are all eessentially unsustainable sinks and have proven to be poor uses of money, but I don’t pretend like I have that much of a voice, so the very least is simply not engaging in using those services, and I don’t. Be the change you want to see.
Need to look deeper at the social security fraud - of Somali's - as once someone dies, the death notice is issued and this ends the social security benefits.
Somali's are a special case - once they retire in social security they move back to Somalia and a family member send their funds to Somalia each month.
When they die in Somalia, the SS checks keep coming and the family members have a second source of income. There are press reports recently that there does not seem to be many old age deaths in the Somali community compared to the rest of the country.
Where your analysis is wrong is that you are measuring convictions - these Somali's that die in Somalia will never be convicted.
If what you describe is actually true (which is unlikely on anything close to a generalizable scale since returnees tend to be economically active and not simply going to retire in Somalia), it's still easily actionable fraud and a second year law student knows enough to bring an indictment. Fraud is difficult to defend in trial since the most common defenses are affirmative ones - which involve admitting to the conduct, and defense attorneys will tell you that it puts you on the back foot since jurors stop listening once the defendant admits to the conduct quite often. Easy plea bargains are catnip for AUSAs and there's no reason why they'd hold off when the operation relies on someone here being the accomplice.
Of course, the actual issue is that since the largest chunk of immigrants arrived in the mid 90s, only a limited number of the community has been here, gainfully employed, and are even eligible to receive social security. Older immigrants have a harder time finding employment and the younger ones would be hitting retirement age around now or in the next few years. It's far more likely that there's a decent amount of remittances sent instead of an actual flood of people retiring to Somalia and being able to carry on a fraudulent scheme long enough to be notable. Perhaps in isolation, but good luck finding enough altruistic elderly naturalized citizens willing to retire to Somalia to die early in order to posthumously defraud the US government to make it into something organized.
Not to mention that this can only be small time in the grand scheme of frauds that are committed anyway. Brett Favre was personally able to divert 7+ million TANF block grant funds from Mississippi. Four people in Florida defrauded about the same amount as the total alleged in Minnesota.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/medical-director-convicted-110-million-addiction-treatment-fraud-scheme
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-florida-men-charged-348m-fraud-scheme-targeting-medicare-beneficiaries
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/florida-laboratory-owner-pleads-guilty-52m-medicare-fraud-scheme-involving-genetic-tests
And there's also a ton of activities that are classified as fraud but really wouldn't fit the colloquial concept. Wire fraud is basically a catch-all since it's hilariously easy to prove. DOJ counts data breaches as fraud even when there's no indication that the data was actually used for fraud or even sold on. My guess is that every American's PII has been leaked somewhere, alongside those of many countries in Europe. Pretty much the entire population of the Netherlands and the UK certainly. Taking away the conflation of "potential fraud", there's still a ton of fraud, since block grants, medicaid billing, contractor, and really any time the federal government divvies out money, there's opportunity. The number in isolation appears big but in the ecosystem it's not since we're talking about hundreds of billions in fraud that we know of in total. How do you fix that? The federal government can stop dishing out block grants and other subsidies, instead of blaming people who neither voted for the programs nor benefit disproportionately from it. Adding law enforcement is really its own fraud - it's basically a welfare program for cops, and they have no incentive to speed things along. The war on drugs is easily the single biggest welfare fraud ever perpetuated, take issue with that first perhaps?
"If what you describe is actually true (which is unlikely on anything close to a generalizable scale since returnees tend to be economically active and not simply going to retire in Somalia)" To which I say you have no idea of the Somali community and I do and I many going home when they hit 62. So, how does one know when they die? By some estimates 500 billion of SS and other benefits are fraud - and millions of people are involved. As our country runs out of the ability to service our debt, what then?
I’d like to remind you that communities don’t make retirement decisions, individuals do. Even if the trend in this case goes completely against what has been observed and recorded for naturalized citizens in developing nations since, well, when we had an immigration system at all (1882), but also, we’re talking about Somali-Americans, not Somalis. They have to pay taxes, their status is audited for the very danger you believe to be outsized, and you should read through the SSA’s OIG reports if you want to learn about the safeguards: https://oig.ssa.gov/audit-reports/
That and the fact that it’s next to impossible to get to Somalia right now with Al-Shabab taking over large pockets of the country again are all good reasons why someone established in the US have little reason to retire to a place where active unrest and terrorist groups are operating and America, once again for some reason, is bombing. If America is bombing, you don’t want to be the American on the ground, do you? The dead cannot inform anyone of their death, but everything from tax forms to consular investigations will indicate the fact. Especially since there are, at last count, under 700 US passport holders in Somalia, including the younger who are working. The billions of fraud is an aggregate total, not the Somalis.
And frankly, social security is a ponzi scheme anyway. The program would be considered a fraudulent scheme without the imprimatur of the government of the US. I personally would like to see it phased out sooner than later since keeping put the ponzi in the long run will not result in much worse outcomes. The best way to stop fraud is to not create the opportunity or reason to do so. Your current contributions aren’t being saved for you but are doled out to recipients today anyway. I don’t expect any benefits at all and will not collect any that are available to me. You want the debt serviced? Going after Somali-Americans will do as much good as DOGE did in nibbling at the very edges, except with even less of an impact. The problem exists in the totality, singling out a very small groupd of minorities ain’t doing anything and can hardly be taken as a good faith effort all things considered. Entitlements, foreign wars, the police-welfare system are all eessentially unsustainable sinks and have proven to be poor uses of money, but I don’t pretend like I have that much of a voice, so the very least is simply not engaging in using those services, and I don’t. Be the change you want to see.
Interesting.