By Timothy Pratt

Sun, Jan 27, 2008 (2 a.m.)

A local housing authority and federal agents are expected to announce next week the first large group of indictments for fraud captured with a new computer program that checks the Social Security numbers of low-income tenants against employment records.

The Las Vegas Housing Authority, working with the Housing and Urban Development Department’s inspector general and the Clark County district attorney, has caught 15 tenants in its Section 8 voucher and public housing programs who did not report income or committed other kinds of fraud, according to James Todak, special agent in charge for the Western region at HUD’s Office of Inspector General.

The tenants are charged with theft by misrepresentation of $339,000 in federal money, he said.

The Las Vegas agency, one of three local housing authorities, has been using a program for 14 months that uses tenants’ Social Security numbers to discover whether heads of household and other adult family members have gotten jobs or applied for unemployment benefits, as well as verifying whether numbers match names, said Dolores Sawyer, who directs the agency’s Section 8 program.

The program also has been useful in exposing cases of identity theft — including that of one woman who found that a construction worker had been using her Social Security number.

Called Enterprise Income Verification, the program is “making our jobs a lot easier,” Sawyer said.

Fraud against housing authorities is a serious issue in the face of ongoing reductions in federal programs to help the poor, Sawyer added.

“We need to make sure every dollar is wisely spent,” she said. “They’re hurting other families ... (that) could be using the money.”

Sawyer said the cases in the batch of expected indictments include one in which a mother didn’t report her 19-year-old daughter’s income and another in which a tenant cheated the system of $50,000.

Officials at the Clark County and North Las Vegas housing authorities also are using the new program. Nancy Wesoff, executive director of the Clark County agency, said the program had helped identify a mother who was renting a subsidized apartment to her daughter, cheating the agency of $36,000.

Todak said his office has been targeting fraud in the Las Vegas area with the tool for six months.

Sawyer said she will advise the 4,321 households in the Section 8 program and the 2,200 in public housing of the computer program’s reach, and why it is better to acknowledge any changes in income. The Section 8 program offers low-income people vouchers that pay all or part of the rent, depending on the family’s or individual’s income.

Sawyer hopes tenants get the proverbial message: Crime does not pay.

“As my mother used to say, ‘Some people don’t believe that fat means grease.’ But it does.”