Refugees denying charges of fraud

01/21/2007
Investigators look into Social Security disability claims

By Michele R. Marcucci, STAFF WRITER

More than two dozen Cambodian refugees in Oakland and elsewhere in the East Bay are fighting allegations that they fraudulently applied for benefits from the Social Security Administration and say they were unfairly targeted.

The agency is questioning whether the refugees are truly disabled, and therefore eligible for benefits that generally top out at $836 a month, said Steve Weiss of Bay Area Legal Aid in Oakland, who is representing some of the Cambodians. Lisa Lunsford, an attorney with the Homeless Action Center in Berkeley, is also working with some of the refugees.

Many of the Cambodians are patients of Dr. Mona Afary, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in working with Afghans and Cambodian refugees. She now works with the refugees at the Center for Empowerment of Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland.

Afary has diagnosed many of her patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes several people in the same family, Weiss and Lunsford said. That — combined with what Social Security may see as Afary's lack of proper clinical training to make such diagnoses — could have triggered the investigations, Afary, her patients' attorneys and spokespeople for Social Security said.

The attorneys accused investigators of lacking the clinical training to assess whether someone was truly faking mental illness, as well as cultural insensitivity toward people who were traumatized by the harsh privations suffered under the Khmer Rouge. Many of the refugees came here in the 1980s.

The attorneys said their clients are poor, rural Cambodians who speak little or no English and may not have been able to adequately describe their mental condition. And they said many were re-traumatized in their contacts with investigators.

"It seems like a lot of insensitivity was involved and just little thought about the impact. It's causing harm to the community," Weiss said.

He and Lunsford said their clients are waiting up to two years for Supplemental Security Income benefits they desperately need and are legally entitled to.

A spokesman for Social Security's Office of the Inspector General said investigators for its Cooperative Disability Investigations program are doing their job, which is to seek out potential benefits fraud before the money is lost. But he said the agency can't tailor its approach for different groups of people.

"If the way you investigate a case is altered due to the cultural background of a subject ... it would lead to a different set of investigative policies and procedures for not only every cultural group, but all kinds of other groups," spokesman Jonathan Lasher said. "You can't tailor a process for a national law enforcement organization to every aspect of the individual subject's person."

There are no public records indicating Afary has been charged with any wrongdoing, Lasher said.

Lasher said investigators for the decade-old program do not have clinical training. He said they bring interpreters if their interview subjects do not speak English.

Weiss and Lunsford said the investigators in the cases they're handling called a commercial translation service over the telephone.

Weiss said Afary's clients go to her because she specializes in working with them and with their specific mental conditions, and some were diagnosed by other doctors before coming to her. She had previously worked with another agency under a grant that specifically paid for her work with this population. And Weiss said Afary's clients have few other places to go.

But Leslie Walker, an Oakland-based spokeswoman for Social Security, said her agency supplies doctors who can make disability determinations, and the agency has one doctor in the Bay Area who speaks Cambodian.

Mary Scully, director of programs for Khmer Health in Connecticut, which focuses on the health needs of Cambodian refugees, said a post traumatic stress disorder diagnosis is not uncommon for Cambodian refugees. She said the majority of them suffer from that and depression. She said many suffered major head injuries, illness and starvation under the reign of the Khmer Rouge.

This is not the first time Cambodians and their health care providers have been the target of Social Security fraud investigations. Similar investigations have taken place in Southern California, Boston and Washington state over the last decade. In those cases, some parties involved with the Cambodians were accused of fraud and others cleared, Scully said.

Weiss and Lunsford said that of the 27 appeals they are handling, just one client has been denied benefits; 13 clients won their benefits, and 13 others are pending.

Shirley Washington, spokeswoman for the state's Disability Determination Service, which processes Social Security applications filed in California, said her agency has made just 20 referrals of possible fraud cases statewide to Social Security investigators over the past year, none of them concerning refugees. Five were from the Oakland office.

But Lasher said Oakland's Cooperative Disability Investigations unit had 301 allegations of fraud referred to them during the 2006 fiscal year, with 294 investigations that resulted in 223 findings of fraud.

He said his investigators could look at additional applications without a referral if they pertain to an ongoing case, such as a doctor or middleman accused of fraud.

Contact Michele R. Marcucci at mmarcucci@angnewspapers.com or (510) 208-6434.