The Department of Homeland Security has, in effect, pleaded guilty to reducing its own income by failing to reject 90 percent of a set of some 320 fraudulent fee waiver applications in a new and interesting fraud case. An estimated quarter of a million dollars was involved, though that total is not mentioned in the release.
The headline of the ICE press release, of course, puts a more positive take on the events: “HSI El Paso arrests local woman charged with defrauding the U.S. government, benefits applicants”.
(All the press releases assume that the reader knows that HSI stands for Homeland Security Investigations, a division within ICE.)
What is interesting about the case is that it relates to an obscure kind of fraud, one that I have not encountered before. The arrested woman, Perla Vidalez, was a form-preparer in the immigration business, and she managed more than 320 times to cheat both her clients, presumably including a lot of illegal aliens, and DHS simultaneously.
What she did was to complete applications for immigration benefits for the individuals, collect the fees that they owed DHS for the benefit in question, and then, unknown to the clients, file papers for them seeking to waive the $600 - $900 in fees for the benefit in question. Vidalez kept the fees and paid the government nothing, since it had waived the fees. The number 320 times $750 for the average fee equals $240,000.
The press release continues: “Vidalez is suspected of having submitted over 320 applications on behalf of her clients, and about 90% were granted fee waivers . . .” In other words, USCIS approved fee waivers for nearly 300 people who were, in fact, able to pay.
Some background may be helpful: USCIS is largely funded by fees, not tax money; it also has a fee-waiver program for low-income applicants. During the Obama administration it created a form that made applying for a fee waiver much easier. The agency generally rubber-stamps 85-90 percent of applications (of all kinds); the approval rate for fee waivers is not unexpected, but it is useful – and unusual – to see it in print.
The case number in the PACER system is 3:22-mj-02982-MAT. To the best of my knowledge USCIS does not publish any statistics on these fee waiver applications, which are designated as form I-912.