Hurricane Katrina fraudsters who billed the United States government for fictitious services and filed claims for phantom hotel guests, and even Dom Perignon champagne, have cost taxpayers up to $2-billion, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The newspaper said the cost of the fraud in the wake of the deadly storm, which hit New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast last August, had ballooned to new heights, citing government audits, criminal prosecutions and congressional probes.
A House of Representatives committee heard testimony earlier this month that fraud in the wake of Katrina had cost taxpayers at least $1-billion.
In one particularly brazen case, prisoners who were jailed when Katrina and a second storm, Hurricane Rita, hit the US southern coast billed the government for rental assistance.
The paper said Katrina had ”produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2-billion”.
It also cited a hotel owner in Sugar Land, Texas, charged with submitting $232 000 in bills for phantom victims, and a woman who tried to collect benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in New Orleans. Prosecutors say the children never existed. — AFP
