History

PAIV was founded on October 3, 1990 by a local agency Fraud Investigator as a grass roots attempt to improve the state’s program integrity efforts and to increase the professionalism of Virginian’s investigative staff. A small group of investigators met in Richmond to unite the Regional Fraud Committees into a statewide group for the purpose of making the State Department of Social Services, the local agencies, the legislature, and the public aware of the problem of welfare fraud.

In the ensuing years, PAIV has worked diligently to put the fraud control function in the proper perspective and to integrate that function into the overall operation of DSS. We have always held as our mandate that controlling welfare fraud is an issue of program integrity and as such, should be treated as a departmental goal and function. In 1998, PAIV successfully petitioned the VA General Assembly to make fraud investigation a mandated program and the State Board of Social Services was charged with the responsibility of designing the operational guidelines to accomplish that purpose. DSS, under the insightful leadership of Commissioner Clarence Carter, responded by establishing a Office of the Inspector General, by significantly increasing the Central Office fraud staff and expanding their function, and by contracting with VISSTA to provide much needed training opportunities for new and existing fraud investigative staff.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

• Proposed and successfully lobbied for Senate Bill 192 in 1998 which amended VA State Code Section 63.1 – 58.2 to require DSS to establish a statewide fraud control program and became the basis of Fraud “FREE” (Fraud Reduction and Elimination Effort).

• Proposed and successfully lobbied for an amendment to the state code to control potential fraud in future implementation of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT).

• Representatives have served on the VISSTA committee to develop new departmental fraud training.

• Representatives have served on the Commissioner’s Advisory Council and Benefits Advisory Committee.

• Representatives have served on both a departmental Salary Study and a departmental Fraud Implementation study conducted with the VPI&SU Center for the Public Administration and Policy.
• State Training Conference 2001
• State Training Conference 2002
• State Training Conference 2004
• State Training Conference 2006
• State Training Conference 2009
• Implementation of the Training & Continuing Education Scholarship for members  2002
• Implementation of the Eileen Grant Achievement Award in 2004
• Implementation of the Fraud Investigator of the Year Award in 2009
• Implementation of an annual  One Day Special Training Event 2012