Thread: NJ millionaires-on-welfare sting: 12 additional individuals charged

NJ millionaires-on-welfare sting: 12 additional individuals charged

By Brittany De Lea Published July 06, 2017


(AP)

Twelve more wealthy individuals in Lakewood, New Jersey have been charged with defrauding Medicaid and other government assistance programs by misrepresenting their incomes, prosecutors said Thursday, after seven couples were charged last week for gaming the system out of $2 million.

The defendants have all been charged with theft by deception, misrepresenting their incomes to show levels low enough in order to qualify for public assistance programs including Medicaid, heating benefits and food stamps (SNAP).

“They’ve been given letters instructing them as to the time frame for appearing. All defendants are expected to respond no later than Tuesday of next week,” the Ocean County, New Jersey prosecutor’s office said in a statement to FOX Business.

The couples charged Thursday fraudulently amassed welfare benefits near $400,000, according to an analysis of data from the prosecutor’s office. One couple alone collected nearly $75,000 in unentitled benefits from Medicaid between 2011 and 2013.

Seven additional couples, including a Rabbi and his wife, were charged just last week with defrauding government assistance programs out of at least $2 million.

More on this...

• NJ millionaires-on-welfare bust: More arrests to come, prosecutor says
• Wealthy New Jersey couples accused of stealing millions from welfare programs

One of the couples allegedly received Medicaid benefits for multiple years despite their annual income of more than $1 million, the complaint said.
Throughout fiscal year 2016, New Jersey spent $14.5 billion on Medicaid, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Throughout the same time period, the country as a whole spent $553.4 billion on the health assistance program.

In another instance, a couple allegedly made $1.8 million through various business endeavors that they had listed under relatives’ names—yet received housing, food and health benefits. They ultimately defrauded the government out of $178,000. The max allowable gross monthly income for a family of five in the state to be eligible for SNAP assistance is $4,385—which amounts to about $52,600 per year.

The prosecutor’s office said Thursday the investigation is ongoing.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/...s-charged.html

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community charged with public benefits fraud

wow! just wow! Millionairs on welfare!

W

'Don't condemn our community' say Lakewood's Orthodox leaders | Di Ionno

Updated on July 6, 2017 at 2:45 PM
Posted on July 6, 2017 at 8:43 AM


Rabbi Aaron Kotler, president of the BMG, Lakewood's largest yeshiva and a member of the township Vaad, a group of Orthodox civic leaders (David Gard | For New Jersey Advance Media)

BY MARK DI IONNO
mdiionno@starledger.com,
Columnist, The Star-Ledger

Ben Heinemann tells this story almost like a parable.

When he moved into Lakewood 28 years ago, a female neighbor came over to welcome him.

She reached out to shake his hand, but Heinemann demurred and explained male Orthodox Jews don't casually touch women.

The woman then offered him some chocolate chip cookies. Heinemann politely declined and told her of his kosher diet.

She then invited him to a neighborhood block party, the following Friday night.

"Well, that wasn't going to work," he said, because of his observance of Shabbat (Sabbath).

"Then she said, 'Well bring your family over for a swim,' and again I explained that men and women don't swim together (in his culture)."

Heinemann appreciated the woman's goodwill and tried to find common ground.

"I invited her and her husband into our home for (kosher) ice cream and cookies, and she said they couldn't because she was a diabetic and her husband had high cholesterol.

"But once we got over those differences, everything was fine!" he said.

Heinemann is the owner of BG Print Group, headquartered in one of the few modern buildings in downtown Lakewood. Since he started the business in 1989, it has grown from a print shop to a marketing and design firm.

He is also a member of the 11-man Vaad (the Hebrew term for council).

The Vaad is a group of rabbis and business owners who immerse themselves in civic affairs.

Following the arrests last week of 14 Lakewood residents for welfare fraud, the Vaad released a statement signed by Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, a member of the Lakewood Development Corp., the arm of local government that oversees and encourages business growth, through grants and loans, in the urban enterprise and foreign trade zones of the township.

The statement said the Orthodox community was "saddened beyond words" over the arrests. In subsequent interviews, Weisberg said there was no "grand conspiracy" among the Orthodox community to steal government services.

Yet, there is a public narrative that says otherwise. That perception often includes the word "all."

As in all the Orthodox are on welfare. And all the Orthodox are married only in the eyes of their faith, allowing the women to get government aid as single mothers. And all the Orthodox don't pay taxes, by hiding income and declaring their property tax-exempt for religious reasons.

Feeding into that last perception is the fact that one of the arrested couples, Rabbi Zalmen Sorotzkin, 39, and his wife, Tzipporah, 35, live in a tax-free home valued at $885,000 and owned by the rabbi's Congregation Lutzk. They are accused of taking $338,642 in government aid from 2009 to 2014.

The hundreds of comments that follow any on-line Lakewood story prove that these perceptions are widespread. The reader comments also feed the Orthodox community's perception that anti-Semitism envelopes them.

Since April, there have been a series of columns in this space about life in Lakewood that have attempted to separate perception from reality. On Sunday, I met with four members of the Vaad in a wide-ranging conversation about the accusatory atmosphere and their plans, as referenced in Heinemann's story, to find common ground.

The members present were Heinemann; Rabbi Aaron Kotler, the president of Beth Medrash Govoha (BMG), the world's largest yeshiva outside of Israel; Joe Atlas, who owns Anchor Auto Lease in Lakewood, and Abe Muller, owner of Kosher West, a large modern grocery store.

The Vaad members were concerned that the latest stories out of Lakewood could be used as "a wholesale condemnation" of the Orthodox community, Kotler said.

"We have a failure in our community that we have to address," Kotler said, referring to the arrests. "Theft is wrong. We need to do better to educate people."

But, he said, in admitting to fraud problems, "we also have to be careful not to be part of the chorus that condemns our community as a whole."

Following the arrests, Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph D. Coronato said his office had given "clear guidance and notice to the Lakewood community in 2015 of what is considered financial abuse of these programs."

"We invited him in," Kotler said. "The idea was to educate people and make sure they understood the rules. We have a regret that we didn't do more."

Sources cited in this column and in other news reports indicated that the problem is systemic and widespread, and that more arrests are coming.

The problem, it seems, has its roots in the sheer number of poor rabbinical students in town who get used to government subsidies.

"The transition can be difficult," Muller said.

The Vaad members acknowledged that many of the rabbinical students in Lakewood's numerous yeshivas qualify for poverty relief.

Tuition at BMG nears $20,000 per year. The yeshiva has 6,500 students, about the same number as the College of New Jersey, and most live within walking distance of the yeshivas. Last year, BMG students got $10,208,627 in federal Pell grants for needy students.

Another $631,183 in Pell grants went to students at five other much smaller Lakewood yeshivas. In comparison, Ocean County College, with an enrollment of 12,000 students received $15 million in Pell grants.

Many of the yeshiva students are married and have multiple children. The median age in Lakewood is 22.4 years, the lowest in New Jersey. Next is New Brunswick, where 50,000 Rutgers students contribute to lower the median age to 23.5.

The Vaad members said the rabbinical students, who are in a government system that yields vouchers for housing and food and pays for their medical needs, have to be better at extracting themselves from the assistance once they begin to generate personal income.

Lakewood's state-run and federally-funded WIC (Women, Infant and Children) office for poor pregnant or breastfeeding women and children under 5 is one of the busiest in the state. Despite a huge number of retirees, Ocean County has the fourth largest WIC client base in the state.

"The challenge for the Orthodox community is to get these students quickly into the workforce,'' Muller said, "where they pay taxes like everybody else, and make them understand the rules."

Heinemann said the focus shouldn't be on the four years the students are taking government aid "but the 40 years after when they pay taxes."

The Vaad members said there are plenty of jobs in Lakewood.

"We have a labor shortage," Kotler said. "We have a thriving tech scene. We have a thriving health care scene. Our job growth has accelerated."

Perhaps most upsetting to the Vaad members and the rest of the Orthodox community is that the arrests overshadow the "benevolence of the community," Muller said.

"It is amazing," he said. "This is a caring and giving community that helps its brothers and sisters."

"What other culture takes care of its people from birth until they put you in the ground," Atlas said. "We do.

Whatever people need, we give it to them."

The next move, the Vaad said, is more education for their community and more outreach to the rest of the people in Lakewood.

Fifteen years ago, Heinemann started a roundtable called "Let's Talk" to bring the Lakewood factions together. The Vaad wants to restart it. They want to pull together community leaders and members not only in Lakewood but the surrounding towns where the Orthodox are beginning to migrate.

"We have to forge relationships," Heinemann said. "And we have to do a lot of listening, too," Kotler added. "It's important we reach out. It's much harder to hate a people when you get to know them as individuals."

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/201..._orthodox.html

Raids in New Jersey town target ultra-Orthodox Jews accused of welfare fraud

Feeding into that last perception is the fact that one of the arrested couples, Rabbi Zalmen Sorotzkin, 39, and his wife, Tzipporah, 35, live in a tax-free home valued at $885,000 and owned by the rabbi's Congregation Lutzk. They are accused of taking $338,642 in government aid from 2009 to 2014.

Kind of a middle eastern philosophy....women burdened with multiple children, parents seem a little strange and now this reveals that there are problems with the health of these children & demands for monies from taxpayer funded programs -similar to muslim middle easterners. Demand, demand.

Years ago, would mostly see in NYC the Orthodox Jews in the diamond district "trading". Have seen many in the Philadelphia area recently also with 6 kids or more. Any area nearby NYC is prime real estate and they will cash in eventually.

It seems the new definition of "community" is race. When I was growing up the term "community" meant your city or town, not your race. I'd like to see us go back to that.