About 11,000 dead people in seven states, including Maryland, have gotten government heating aid over the past year or so, according to congressional investigators.

They say that the grave is cold, but it's illegal to receive energy subsidies when your address is six feet under.

Plenty of other Marylanders may also be ripping off the $5 billion Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, to judge from last month's report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In the seven states, the GAO found households receiving more than $100 million in benefits even though recipients weren't sufficiently documented on state records as being eligible.

Hundreds of prisoners also collected assistance, another mark of fraud. So did nursing-home residents, who aren't eligible for aid either. Households listed deceased and incarcerated people and other nonresidents to qualify for or inflate their so-called LIHEAP benefits, which are paid to energy companies and landlords to reduce family heating bills.

One Maryland nursing home resident received $3,600 in aid that was applied to energy bills at another address. In another case, the Maryland officials who administer the program paid two sets of benefits to the same residence.

The GAO found more than a thousand federal employees who lied about their income so they could receive assistance. One postal worker in Illinois received $840 in heating aid by saying her income was zero. In fact, she earned $80,000 a year, but she told investigators that she had seen "long lines" of people applying for energy benefits and wanted the "free money."

Investigators found one set of energy-aid recipients living in a million dollar-plus house in Potomac and another driving a nearly new Mercedes and living in a $2 million home near Chicago.

The GAO also nailed Maryland and West Virginia in a kind of sting operation involving a bogus energy seller and nonexistent landlords. The agency set up fake companies and got both states to send checks for hundreds of dollars.

Perhaps the most disturbing finding is that Maryland and the other states "lack key efforts in all three crucial elements of a well-designed fraud prevention system, preventive controls, detection and monitoring and investigations and prosecutions," the agency said.

Given the lack of controls found by the GAO, it's no wonder that many people seem to be trying to steal from the government and succeeding.

Many of the heating-assistance recipients in the seven states that couldn't be sufficiently documented as eligible probably were cases of simple errors — transposed Social Security numbers, misspelled names and so forth, the agency said. But there are so many signs of genuine fraud that it's clear Maryland and everybody else has lots of work to do.

"We strongly support accurate and appropriate awarding of benefits to those that truly need them," says Ralph Markus, director of the state's Office of Home Energy Programs. "Any dollar wasted is a dollar that can't be used to help a needy family."

Like the family in Potomac, one of Maryland's richest jurisdictions? In fact, the Potomac couple with the million-dollar house was elderly and on a low income despite their valuable property, Markus said. Federal rules don't include home value when states decide who is eligible for heating aid, he said.

Even so, there is plenty Maryland can do on its own to tighten the program.

Markus' office of six people supervised the distribution of almost $90 million in low-income heating assistance for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Approving benefits is done mainly by cities and counties, where 175 employees processed 163,000 applications during that period, he said.

The LIHEAP program prohibits more than 10 percent of the federal dollars to be spent on administrative costs. Officials from several states complained to GAO that that limits the amount of double-checking and detective work they can do.

But in an age of computers and databases, it shouldn't be that hard to cross-check lists of heating-assistance recipients with those of prisoners, government workers, Social Security beneficiaries and nursing home residents getting Medicaid. The local agencies also need to do a much better job of entering the applications correctly.

"We are looking overall at our database system to see what we can enhance to prevent any kind of fraud," says Markus.

Good. They're also considering kicking cheaters out of the program for a year or two.

But they ought to go further. Ineligibly collecting energy aid is theft. As a deterrent, at least a few of these thieves ought to be prosecuted, even if the cost exceeds the value of what was stolen.

If these government agencies really want to help low-income energy consumers, their first priority ought to be restoring confidence in the badly flawed system that makes the aid possible.



