He and his colleagues, who are working on the investigation alongside the usual CID caseload of fraud, rapes and serious assaults, no longer call the man John Doe. "The people who work at the mortuary found it very difficult to have somebody in their…" He looks down at the folders on his desk, "…care, would you say?
Its caseload of open fraud inquiries surged to 533 investigations in June from 102 in 2001.
Authorities sealed off Mr. Wales's office and were poring over his caseload, which included cases of mail fraud, aviation fraud and theft of federal property.
Already, the F.B.I.'s caseload of 500 mortgage fraud investigations is up fivefold since 1997.
The government's stated aim to reduce the caseload by 20%, when DLA has a fraud rate of just 0.5%, indicates that hundreds of thousands of genuinely disabled people can expect to lose out as the goalposts are narrowed.
It has yet to do so.In one fast-growing area of fraud, involving pharmacies and prescription drugs, federal investigators have seen caseloads quadruple over the past five years.
And the agency's fraud division is trying to hire more FCPA experts to handle its heavy caseload.
The overwhelming majority used to involve fraud related to the origination of mortgages, but now about 40percentt of the bureau's caseload involves homeowner-rescue schemes, said Timothy A. Gallagher, the FBI's section chief for financial crimes.
The division, charged with investigating fraud among health care providers paid to treat impoverished children and the disabled, has drastically increased both its caseload and the potential monetary returns associated with it over the last fiscal year.
Because not every fraud is detected, it is hard to know whether there are more instances of fraud or the enforcement level is increasing, though experts say the heavier caseload is indicative of broader trends.
