FCC Kept ‘Obamaphone’ Fraud Quiet to Expand Program

Obamaphones, which some view as a redistribution of wealth, via free cell phone, is wrought with fraud. Lifeline, the program that provides the poor with free phone service was up for an FCC voted “to expand the program”.

The clash of committees occurred when five members of the commission backed unanimously the Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), but were instructed to keep under wraps the details of the investigation until after the April 1 FCC vote for the expansion of the Lifeline program.

“Commissioners were told that the Notice of Apparent Liability could not be released or publicly discussed until April 1, 2016, conveniently one day after the Commission was scheduled to expand the Lifeline program to broadband,” Pai wrote. “That’s not right.”

Ajit Varadaraj Pai, Commissioner at the United States Federal Communications Commission, did not say who issued that directive. However, it had the effect of preventing public knowledge of widespread fraud in the Lifeline program ahead of a contentious vote on expanding it despite persisting concerns about a lack of internal safeguards.

The commission investigated cell provider Total Call for defrauding the taxpayer of $9.7 million, by enrolling ineligible and duplicate consumers.

According to the commission, Total Call employees enrolled tens of thousands of duplicate Lifeline beneficiaries and pocketed the extra subsidies. The FCC caught onto the scheme when the company enrolled an undercover FCC investigator in the program without asking for any eligibility documentation.

The program has faced criticism for its negligent enrollment requirements and practices.  The subsidized phones are for low-income American, and eligibility has been tied to the SNAP benefits card, another government program also teeming with fraud allegations.

That drew the ire of Commissioner Michael O’Reilly, who said the use of SNAP cards as Lifeline verification mechanisms is woefully inadequate.

“I must once again lodge my extreme frustration that the Commission continues to rely on SNAP as an entry point in the Lifeline program, and has the gall to claim that it is a highly accountable program, when it is painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that SNAP is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse,” he wrote in a partial dissent in the Total Call case.

The FCC recently voted on an expansion in the program to include 3G wireless broadband, yet enforcing proper enrollment policies has not been included in the expansion.

The existence of a massive ongoing Lifeline fraud investigation might’ve affected public perception of that vote, if not the vote itself, leading Pai to call the muzzling of commissioners on the Total Call investigation “conveniently” timed.

Pai also objected to commission delays that he said prevented it from sanctioning Total Call for the full scale of its apparent misconduct.

Irresponsible bureaucrats,  probably under pressure from Obama, who loves to take tax dollars and spread the wealth around, ignored the more important issue, preventing and punishing fraud in the Lifeline program in order to expand it.  Much like the broken immigration system, where amnesty with no wall is the left’s pledge, free phones without fraud protection is also reflective of their style of government.

Source: freebeacon