The Justice Department charged twelve San Diego County residents this week with running what prosecutors called ghost daycares, billing taxpayers more than $10 million for childcare that never happened.
The operation was named Cradle to Grift. Somebody at DOJ earned their salary that day.
More than 250 federal, state and local officers made a coordinated takedown last Thursday morning, arresting all twelve and executing search warrants at the homes supposedly serving as daycare facilities. Each defendant allegedly collected between $538,000 and $1.2 million. Several cleared a million dollars apiece.
One detail tells you everything about how this worked.
According to the complaints, one defendant left the United States on or about January 1, 2024, and did not return until around January 30.
She kept filing attendance records the entire time.
Eight direct deposits landed during that stretch, totaling $14,970, for supervising children she could not have been in the same hemisphere as.
Nobody noticed. Not the county, not the nonprofits cutting the checks, not anyone at the federal agency funding the program. A provider was out of the country for a month, submitted paperwork claiming she was watching kids, and the money went out on schedule.
Here is how the program is supposed to work.
Health and Human Services sends federal money to California so low-income families can afford childcare. In San Diego County, the program is administered by the county itself along with two nonprofits, Child Development Associates and the YMCA.
When a family qualifies, the administrators pay the provider directly. The provider submits monthly attendance records with dates and times. Both the provider and the parent sign those records under penalty of perjury.
That is the control. A signature.
That is the entire verification system standing between the Treasury and anyone willing to lie on a form. California also requires licensed providers to actually be present and supervising children, which is the kind of rule that only means something if somebody occasionally checks.
Prosecutors say these twelve cases are unrelated to each other. Twelve separate people, working independently, each apparently figured out the same thing at the same time.
When a dozen strangers independently discover the identical hole in your program, the problem is not that a dozen strangers are unusually clever.
What you will see elsewhere, and what we would rather say.
DOJ noted in its release that the defendants are naturalized American citizens and lawful permanent residents originally from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. That is in the official record and we are not going to pretend it is not.
A great deal of the coverage has made that the headline, and some of it has gone further, presenting the list of names as the story itself.
We think that is the weaker argument, and not because it is impolite.
It is weaker because it lets the actual culprit off the hook. If your explanation for this is where twelve defendants were born, then you have implied that the program is basically sound and merely attracted the wrong people. It is not sound. It paid a woman for a month she spent on another continent. It would pay anyone, from anywhere, who was willing to sign a form. The names on these complaints tell you who allegedly walked through the open door. They do not tell you why the door was open.
And prosecutors themselves said the twelve cases are unrelated, which makes a coordinated-ring narrative harder to sustain than the headlines suggest.
The part that should actually make you angry.
This money existed to help working parents afford childcare so they could hold a job.
Every dollar that went to a daycare with no children in it was a dollar that did not go to a single mother in San Diego trying to get to a shift on time. The IRS Criminal Investigation chief said it plainly: this was not victimless. It deprived working parents of support they were entitled to.
Twelve providers. Ten million dollars. Years of monthly paperwork, signed under penalty of perjury, sailing through untouched.
The Assistant Attorney General had the line of the week: if you lie about babysitting, we will have to babysit you in prison.
Fine. Do that.
Then go find out who was supposed to be checking the attendance sheets, because whatever they were doing for the last several years, it was not that.
- Article Source:
The Post Millennial
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