Dear Urban Diplomat: should I rat out my disability-scamming colleague?
Dear Urban Diplomat,
I’m a teacher struggling to find full-time work. I recently got a job at a high school, but it only lasts until the end of the school year. Meanwhile, another teacher at my school has been off work for two years with knee trouble. Recently, I saw pictures on social media of her skating. It’s infuriating that she’s collecting long-term disability while clearly faking, especially with teachers getting slammed in the media over our contract negotiations. Keep her secret, or turn her in?
—High School Confidential, Danforth Village
The photos of your supposed system-milking colleague only prove one thing: social media is the death of privacy. What they don’t show, at least not conclusively, is that she’s a scammer. It’s possible (though not likely) that skating is part of her rehab. As frustrating as it may seem, you don’t know the whole story, so it’s best not to meddle. And if she is scamming? She’s clearly not very good at it and will get chased down by justice sooner or later.
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She may have more disabilities than just the knee problem–there are invisible disabilities too. Think of someone who has epilepsy, migraines, fibromyalgia, or mental illness; you wouldn’t be able to see that.
I’ll come clean here; I receive benefits (as well as assistance in college, with the idea of eventually becoming employable) for an invisible disability, myself. It can be hard when people assume I’m not disabled because they can’t see a wheelchair or crutches. I’d be perfectly capable of, for example, going to a party… but I’d be so exhausted afterwards that I wouldn’t be able to do much (either fun or work) for the next couple of days. I still do it sometimes anyway because I like being with my friends, and then I pay the price. That’s life.
Maybe your friend is like that; she went ice-skating even though she knew she would probably have to spend the next few days on her couch with ice packs on her knees. Sometimes people do that, just because they don’t want to miss a chance to go out with friends.
Like most people on disability, I’m pretty angry at the people who defraud the system. That’s money supposed to keep us alive, but sometimes it gets stolen by our relatives (the most common sort of fraud) or claimed by someone who isn’t even disabled (actually quite uncommon, but extremely infuriating nonetheless). There’s never enough to go around, and when someone takes it who isn’t supposed to, it hurts all of us.
At the same time, sometimes when someone who really needs disability payments is accused of fraud, or assumed not to be disabled enough to need them, there are tragic consequences. Some people have died by starvation or lack of medical care because they couldn’t get benefits. People have been told to work even though they had terminal cancer. Those stories haunt me, because I know they happen to the weakest of us, the ones who have the least ability to advocate for themselves.
If you want to prevent disability fraud, the best thing to do is to get to know disabled people in your neighborhood, because the most common perpetrator of fraud is the family member of a disabled person, mistreating and neglecting them in order to take their disability payments.
Your friend–I don’t know; maybe she was disabled to begin with, has recovered, and didn’t bother to tell them. With a temporary disability like a knee injury, she will probably be subject to yearly exams (my disability is permanent, and even I get exams every five years). At her first yearly exam, when they see that she is now capable of walking reasonable distances without pain on a regular basis, they will tell her she’s ready to go back to work. On the other hand, maybe she really still is disabled; maybe those photos of her ice-skating was only what she can do on a good day at the price of being exhausted afterwards. If you want to confront her, take her out for coffee and have an honest chat; don’t get angry and accuse her of crimes. You’re not a doctor or a police officer. Or, if you don’t want to talk to her, you could just let her be.
I won’t limit my commentary on this on a basis of “we don’t know the whole story”. We do. She’s claiming a disability for knee trouble, and she can be seen skating (possibly among other things). That sounds like outright fraud. Now, UD is right, it is plausible that part of therapy for the knee trouble may be to keep active in some form, but this should not stop you from reporting it. If it’s part of the therapy, they do nothing. If it’s not, and she is faking, then you’ve got her shut down.
Aside from the fact that its generally the right thing to do, consider what impact this has on you personally. You, yourself, said that you’re struggling to find full-time work. If she’s faking, her job will still be there for her when she’s “better”, when in actual fact she may not deserve it at all. If you successfully call her out, it’s conceivable that a job will become available once she gets the boot. Incidentally, you’ve just gained hero status from exposing a fraud. Don’t you see how the right thing can just unfold here?
I can see that. If she’s really committing fraud, then I’d turn her in, too; but knowing my own experiences, and knowing how very quick the system is to eject anyone they suspect of fraud, I’d want to know more than just that one post on Facebook.
People smoke despite having terminal lung cancer, play football despite having had a concussion, or carry their kids piggyback even though they know it’ll make their back pain flare up. Ice-skating with bum knees would be a pretty stupid thing to do, but that doesn’t mean people with bum knees never ice-skate anyway. And, at the same time, we don’t know how long she was ice-skating. Did she take two turns around the rink and spend the rest of the time sipping hot chocolate and chatting? If I had bad knees and my friends were all going ice-skating, I might go anyway just to hang out, and if I were wise enough only to go around the rink a couple of times, I wouldn’t even be going past what my knees would allow.
People jump to conclusions when it comes to invisible (or less-visible) disabilities. I hate benefits fraud, too. It affects me more directly than it will ever affect able-bodied taxpayers. Because some idiot decided to cheat the system, you might need to skip a night out–but I might need to skip dinner. That’s the way it is. But if you were to turn her in, and she really needed disability payments, and she really couldn’t work, and she couldn’t convince them that she really couldn’t work… then what? She might end up homeless, or couch-surfing with family. Now she’s not just disabled, but disabled and very poor. You could ruin her life, literally.
We need to think twice, three times, ten times, before we go tattling on people we think don’t look disabled. Yeah, disability fraud sucks, and it’s a nasty thing for a person to do, and it implies they don’t care about their community nearly as much as they should–but what if they’re not committing fraud? That’s why I think, if I were in a situation like this, I wouldn’t just assume that “the right thing” is as simple as turning them in. If I knew for sure they were committing fraud, sure. But not on the strength of a single ice-skating photo.
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Those could be old photos, too. You never know. Talk to your colleague (in as non-confrontational and non-threatening an approach as possible) about it before you start tattling.