Whitefish Bay couple charged with health care, food
benefits fraud
By Bruce
Vielmetti of the Journal Sentinel
Dec. 22, 2015
A
Whitefish Bay couple has been charged with fraudulently collecting nearly
$115,000 in state health care and food benefits from 2007 to 2014, when one of
them was earning about $160,000 a year.
Authorities
say Mary Carini-Gallagher, 51, and Todd Schaller, 52, repeatedly misled the
state Department of Health Services about their joint finances and living
arrangement.
State officials didn't spot
the alleged fraud, even after the couple and their home were featured in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "At Home
With" feature story in 2012. That didn't happen until
someone sent the Office of Inspector General an anonymous letter in July 2014.
Carini-Gallagher
faces counts of public assistance fraud, collecting benefits and failing to
disclose events affecting eligibility. Each is punishable by up to five years
in prison.
Schaller
faces two counts of conspiracy to commit public assistance fraud and a single
count of getting less than $2,000 in public assistance benefits by fraud. The
first two carry the five-year maximum sentence, and the third count has a
maximum prison term of 18 months.
Both
were charged Friday and made their first court appearances Tuesday. Court
Commissioner David Sweet released both on $1,500 signature bonds and set
preliminary hearings for Jan. 22.
According
to the criminal complaint:
Investigators
raided the couple's home in the 5900 block of Santa Monica Blvd. in March. At
that time, investigators found several records indicating the couple had
resided together since 2007. Each had children from previous marriages, and one
child together.
Carini-Gallagher
had initially qualified for and received public assistance. But when she moved
in with Schaller, who was an executive at a concrete company, she failed to
inform the DHS about her change in circumstances, time after time, even after the
couple bought the house in Whitefish Bay in 2009.
Carini-Gallagher
also claimed to DHS that one of her daughters was still living with her when
the daughter was, in fact, living and studying in Thailand.
In
January 2013, Schaller applied for food stamps for himself, listing his two
older children as part of his household, though they resided with their mother,
while omitting that he lived with Carini-Gallagher, her children, and the
couple's own daughter. Four days before he applied, Schaller had gotten a
$53,369 severance check from VCNA Prairie Material, a major supplier of mixed
concrete in the area.
While
detectives were in her home serving the search warrant in March,
Carini-Gallagher first said she had just skimmed the various public benefit
forms and didn't realize she was supposed to report her change in household.
But she later admitted intentionally misleading the state about her true
situation to continue getting the extra money.
Carini-Gallagher
"stated that being a mother was what she was born to do and that she
falsified the information to DHS so she could stay at home with her
children."
The
2009 purchase price on the 2,300-square-foot, four-bedroom home: $380,000. The
current value is estimated at well over $400,000.
I’m of two
minds regarding this situation.
One, in the
end, the woman finally became honest and admitted she wanted to stay home and
raise her children herself and she didn’t have the income to support that…Of
course the man she was living with had the income; but, he simply decided it
was cheaper to not marry her and assume responsibility for her and the children
from a previous relationship.
So she
constructed a middle-class life-style, which was basically a lie, in order to
become the stay-at-home mom she clearly wanted to be. In the process, she defrauded the state and it’s
taxpayers for thousands claiming benefits to feed, cloth and provide health
care for herself and her children.
My second
thought while being sympathetic to her cause, is that she should be held
accountable for her actions as women like this enable idiots like her live-in
boyfriend to get away with his ‘spit in the face’ to our society’s norms and values.
He presented
a fascade to his neighbors and portrayed himself as one of them. For all intents and purposes he was a loving
faux husband and father providing his family with a home and feeding and
clothing them just like all his neighbors were doing for their families,
blended or otherwise. Meanwhile he was doing this on the backs of his neighbors
since it was his neighbors who were feeding and providing free health care for
his faux family…
So punishment
must be meted out to both, arrangements must br made to pay back the monies
they owed. I just hope the main
punishment doesn’t fall on the mother here and it is properly apportioned
between this pair.
