The Public Policy
Bovard, James
THE PUBLIC POLICY by James Bovard Crimes on Paper A s Hosep Bajakajian was preparing to fly back to his native Syria in 1994, U.S. customs officials at Los Angeles Airport detained him. They...
...Travelers carrying more than $10,000 in cash into or out of the country must declare the money to Customs officials, or risk having it seized...
...The American Spectator • January 1998 45...
...Medicare routinely refuses to compensate doctors for many of the services that they provide to its recipients, because of its own "deceitful" and "unfair" rules, the court panel noted...
...Bajakajian's only sin was failing to fill out the bureaucratic form...
...In 1993 the federal government sued psychiatrist George Krizek for $81 million, charging that he had made false Medicare and Medicaid claims for his treatment of patients...
...Many of Dr...
...They discovered that he and his wife were transporting $357,144 in cash—the profits from his two gas stations and money destined for Syrian relatives...
...Each year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, citizens and businesses spend over 6.7 billion hours filling out forms for various federal agencies...
...Bajakajian had failed to fill out a Form 4790, as required by the Bank Secrecy Act of 197o...
...44 January 1998 • The American Spectator testified that Lacy had ordered his workers to falsify records and documents...
...What happened to Hosep Bajakajian is just another example of the government's increasing fetish for paperwork...
...Krizek worked long hours on behalf of his patients, most of whom were elderly and poor...
...For almost two decades, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration deceived the American public regarding the risk of airbags —the auto "safety" devices activated by explosives built into car dashboards that hit people in the face at 200 miles per hour...
...But the feds displayed a moral turpitude much worse than what they accused Lacy of...
...Park Police effectively dumped fifty cases of confiscated beer into a tributary of the Potomac River, no charges were filed over what was a blatant violation of the Clean Water Act...
...Krizek," it decided, "is not public enemynumber one...
...In November 1992, a federal jury in Arkansas took less than an hour to acquit four corporate officials of Aviation Inc...
...Lacy received a second trial, and was convicted on one count of polluting a stream and seven counts of falsifying environmental records...
...In November the agency announced that people could now apply for permission to deactivate their air bags—but only after they submitted an official form pleading medical necessity or some other extreme circumstance...
...The agency knows that its system is wildly inaccurate...
...Attorney Nancy Spodick told reporters: "A lot of small companies are under the perception that the government shouldn't regulate them because they are small...
...Ben Lacy, a 74-year-old apple cider producer in Virginia, was faced with 2.4 years in jail and $2 million in fines after federal bureaucrats discovered eight errors in the thousands of lines of reports he was required to submit between 1991 and 1993 under the Clean Water Act...
...Consider the recent debate over airbag safety...
...He is at worst, a psychiatrist with a small practice who keeps poor records...
...however, is the power government commandeers via endless reporting requirements...
...Decaffeinated coffee contains a higher percentage of methylene chloride than that...
...Customs confiscated Bajakajian's cash, and he has been fighting ever since to get it back...
...While the feds increasingly claim a right to destroy paperwork violators financially, the government itself disrupts the lives of millions with its false claims...
...The federal government prosecuted the firm because the waste water it poured on the ground contained 0.0003 percent of the solvent methylene chloride, which the EPA labeled as hazardous...
...The airbag paperwork trap is a perfect example of how the government now exists: not to safeguard its citizens, but to expand the domain of its own power by destroying the lives of those who fail to cross their t's or dot their i's...
...The more forms there are to complete, the more likely someone will make a mistake—and the more Damoclean swords the government has available with which to terrify its citizens...
...His case is now before the Supreme Court...
...At the oral hearings before the Supreme Court, the attorney for the Clinton administration said that any cash over Sio,000 not reported on the Form 4790 is "dangerous money...
...If the feds decide that someone claiming medical necessity is lying, that individual could face perjury charges and up to five years in prison merely for trying to keep his family safe...
...Trivial paperwork violations have become a boom industry for federal prosecutors...
...Both a federal district and a federal appeals court have concluded that the money was honestly acquired...
...The man later told a private investigator hired by Lacy's lawyers that he had lied on the stand—and had been encouraged to do so by the federal prosecutors...
...Because the feds will permit air bags to be deactivated only in exceptional cases, millions who wish to deactivate them won't be allowed to...
...Assistant U.S...
...Martin's Press...
...Worse yet, the government's key witness was a former Lacy employee who Filling out the wrong government form could cost you...
...Naturally, the prosecutors themselves faced no penalties from the Justice Department for possibly encouraging perjured testimony...
...We were ignorant of it...
...Federal prosecutors blocked a local environmental group from testifying that Lacy's operation in fact did no harm to the local stream—which was ostensibly why the Clean Water Act had been invoked in the first place...
...These wasted hours are bad enough...
...more alarming, JAMES BOVARD is the author ofLost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St...
...Federal agencies plant paperwork land mines with growing regularity...
...I hope this serves to be a deterrent to companies big and small...
...Of course, the federal government is exempt from the False Claims Act...
...But since the feds believed the company had violated the paperwork reporting requirement, they demanded their pound of flesh...
...A nother notorious case saw the feds try to torpedo an Arkansas company for not filing a form with the EPA regarding the disposal of its wastewater...
...For the government to sue for more than eighty million dollars in damages against an elderly doctor and his wife is unseemly and not justified...
...The fact that it was honest, hard-earned money, says the Customs Service, is "not relevant...
...Each year the Internal Revenue Service sends out millions of deficiency notices with wrongful demands for additional payments and penalties...
...Neither the EPA nor the Justice Department bothered to conduct any tests to determine whether the wastewater was actually hazardous...
...The feds, he said, had assured him that "it is very hard to convict someone of perjury...
...He was fined $io,000 —far less than the more than $250,000 in legal expenses he had undergone to defend himself...
...Krizek's lawyers said that the psychiatrist's sometimes imprecise billing (submitted by his Czech immigrant wife) also resulted in extensive undercharges to the government...
...Partly as a result of National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's suppression of evidence of airbag dangers, scores of children have been killed in grisly accidents, including a few decapitations...
...Naturally, federal bureaucrats face no penalty for deceiving the public about airbags...
...Krizek's patients were afflicted with horribly severe psychiatric disorders and suffered simultaneously from other serious medical conditions...
...of charges that they "conspired to knowingly transport hazardous waste without a manifest and knowingly discharged pollutants from a point source into waters of the United States without a permit" The company operated an aircraft refinishing and maintenance business that used solvents to strip paint from aircraft...
...44 Trivial paperwork violations have become a boom industry for federal prosecutors...
...Federal judge Stanley Sporkin estimated that Krizek had overcharged the government for $47,000 over a seven-year period...
...As Worth magazine reported, "According to a confidential agency report, only IRS demands for $25,000 or more are checked by humans for mistakes...
...IRS computers spit out bills charging lesser amounts with reckless abandon—and taxpayers often pay up without a peep...
...A Park Police spokesman explained: "We didn't know...
...Yet, as a federal appeals court acknowledged, it was "undisputed that Dr...
...Krizek was prosecuted under the False Claims Act, which states that a person can be found guilty of filing a fraudulent claim against the government (which carries triple damages and a $1o,000 fine for each violation) if that person "acts in reckless disregard of the truth or falsity of the information" on which the claim is based...
...Incidentally, in November, after the U.S...
...We have a dangerous situation on our hands...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 1
