BALTIMORE — A newly released report from Baltimore City's Inspector General reveals potential fraud in how reimbursement payments were issued for the Water4All program.
The program discounts City water rates of residents earning below poverty wages.
In October 2023, the Inspector General found a Human Services worker in the Mayor's Office of Children and Family Success, approved $209,000 in payouts without authorization.
Managers recalled the worker signing off on applications appeared to be irregular and should have instead been forwarded to Public Works.
On occasion the worker allowed separate payments of $6,000, $7,000, $10,000 and $12,000 to be processed, despite rules requiring a manager for amounts over $5,000.
While the $10,000 and $12,000 payments were able to pulled back, others were not.
The worker ended up being terminated in November 2023.
In response to the Inspector General, the Mayor's Office of Children and Family Success said they've since upgraded internal controls to prevent things like this from happening again.
Now human services workers can only submit applications, not approve them. Regular managers are only allowed to approve a maximum refund of $1,700 before it has to go through upper management. All payments greater than $4,000 requires Public Works to conduct an audit.
The new system has alerts in place for accounts receiving more than one credit per year.
A transition to an in-house Workday system was also completed.
Since June 2024 there have been 50 audits, 11 of which failed.
Alleged fraud by the unnamed worker was forwarded to law enforcement.
Read the full report here.
