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If anyone out there needed another scandal to confirm that state officials haven't been doing their jobs, they got it this week.
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On Tuesday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story of day care provider Latasha Jackson, a 32-year-old Milwaukee woman who has been fraudulently billing the state for a decade.
A mother of three, Jackson lives in a million-dollar mansion (with an indoor pool) and drives a Jaguar. She was paid more than $90,000 in August for providing child care services through Wisconsin Shares, a state program for low-income working parents.
The list of grievances against Jackson is shocking. She initially lied about her income to qualify for the program, but was never charged. Over the course of several years, she built a child care business and was routinely accused of falsifying documents (attendance records, for example, never clearly verified how many children were at her day care center) and violating state regulations (more than 150 violations found in inspections from 2001-2007, but nothing was ever enforced).
Jackson's employees didn't know the names of children in their care. They were accused of using drugs and watching pornographic movies while on duty and leaving all the children in the care of one teenage boy. In 2006, a 2-year-old boy was left alone outside for 10 minutes. Jackson repeatedly lashed her nephew with a belt in 2007 and her license was revoked. By then, she'd been paid $1.6 million in state funds.
She requested food and child care assistance from Waukesha County and received it, then began working at another child care facility. When investigators learned her boyfriend was living with her (he made $88,000 per year driving a van for another day care center) and she had tens of thousands of dollars in unexplained deposits, Waukesha County officials cut off her monthly aid and required her to pay back the $27,000 she'd received. Again, no charges were filed.
She reapplied for a day care license in Waukesha County in 2008 and was approved to care for 110 children. She reopened her center under a new name, employed many of the same workers and deliberately hired parents with four or five children to secure more funding from Wisconsin Shares. Each child was worth up to $200 in subsidies, the Journal Sentinel reported.
Total it up, and Jackson has scammed $3 million off the state. They finally shut her business down last week after admitting that paperwork had been overlooked when she was approved for licensure.
Disgust-with both Jackson and an inattentive government-is my visceral reaction. Families struggle to pay their bills, the state cranks up fees to fund more public programs, and we witness how effortlessly taxpayers are robbed.
As the Journal Sentinel reported, only the threat of an impending scandal closed Jackson down. After she was interviewed, she reported her fraud. When regulators learned the story would be published, they quickly acted-to save face, one would assume.
Too late.
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©The Chetek Alert 2009
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