Remember that time when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon had lost $2.3 trillion dollars, and then the next day, the planes flew into the World Trade Center? Just how much federal fraud, waste, and abuse do you suppose happens in an average year here in America? We don’t know, which is awful.
An unfolding scandal in Australia might give us an idea, however. The country’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which is sort like our Obamacare exchange managed SSI through the Social Security office, has been spending nearly $6 billion a year on things like sex toys, trips to Japan, and Tarot card readings.
These aren’t individuals pretending to be disabled who are allegedly ripping off the system. These are the insurance providers on Australia’s NDIS exchange. There’s been a lot of finger-pointing between Australia’s political parties to lay blame on each other for the fraud, but no one really seems to oversee the $30 billion-per-year program, and no one is doing anything to crack down on the fraud, according to media reports down under.
They’re not even exactly sure how much is being stolen from the NDIS. The country’s Criminal Intelligence Commission CEO Michael Phelan estimates the total fraud as being up to 20% of the NDIS’s annual $30 billion budget. The best estimates put the fraud somewhere between $5.5 billion and $6 billion. Keep in mind that this doesn’t include things like overcharging and fake invoices. The insurance providers are just blatantly spending money on personal things for themselves.
Bill Shorten, the man who is technically supposed to be the Minister for NDIS, says that the fraud encompasses many of the following things:
Minister Shorten announced this list in November 2022 when he was first posted to the job, and he vowed to crack down on the fraudsters. No arrests have been made since then and none of the providers have been kicked off the exchange.
The truly funny thing about this is that the insurance providers were not sneaky about this at all. They sent invoices to the government for their weed, sex toys, taxidermy, Tarot card readings, and everything else! No one at the NDIS bothered to ever say no to those reimbursements.
This has been going on at the NDIS for at least the past ten years, according to Australian media reports. Australia’s entire population is around 26 million people, so their federal government is only a fraction of the size of ours.
How difficult would it be for our federal programs to be rippedoff to a much larger degree? It would certainly explain where all the money has gone during Joe Biden’s time in office. The federal government appropriated $7.5 billion to build new electric car chargers a couple of years ago; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has only managed to build seven chargers in total.
Biden signed a $42 billion appropriation more than three years ago to deliver high-speed internet to everywhere in rural America. Since then, zero new people have received internet access. They haven’t connected a single household. So, where’sthe money going? Maybe we should ask the NDIS.
