It’s a continuing trend in the headlines: Fraudsters are exploiting government-funded programs or targeting public-sector organizations directly. Fraudsters targeted Medicare. A child nutrition program was exploited in Minnesota. Hundreds of millions of dollars in California welfare benefits were stolen by a Romanian crime ring. 

All these fraud schemes are similar in that they involve government programs, but, according to Linda Miller, there's one more similarity: All these systems were designed for trust. That was the subject of “Designed for Trust, Exploited at Scale: Why Government is Easy to Defraud,” presented by Miller, president of Program Integrity Alliance, at the 37th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference. 

You may always hear that fraud is not a victimless crime, and that is true even within government and law enforcement agencies and the rest of the public sector. When fraud impacts these agencies, its effects can eventually trickle down to communities, hurting agency budgets, community programs and more.