This wouldn't be quite as bad if they hadn't already done an audit back in 2010 and found a lot of these things and done nothing to fix them. Some of this is just obnoxious and outright failure to do their job. As much as I hate people getting public benefits that they don't need or deserve, I hate government employees that get paid to do a job and epically fail for years and never lose their job.

The 2˝-year audit found a total of 1,164 people who continued to receive welfare benefits for periods of six months to up to 27 months after they died, totaling nearly $2.4 million in payments.

Five regional DTA offices could not provide documentation for what happened to 30,000 blank EBT cards, the auditors said, raising questions about security and whether employees may have inappropriately used the cards, which work much like debit cards to allow welfare benefits to make purchases. The audit did not identify any specific criminal activity.

For example, the department failed to follow up on people who made excessive requests for replacement EBT cards, a likely indication of illegal trafficking of the cards. One individual had been issued as many as 127 replacement cards since 2006.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...TaP/story.html