A Bureaucrat Even a Politician Can Love

In 2004, Daniel Levinson was handed the kind of assignment that can make or break a career. A veteran government auditor who oversaw contracts at the not-so-exciting U.S. General Services Administration in Washington, Levinson was bumped way up the food chain to Inspector General of the Health and Human Services Dept., a promotion that put him in charge of rooting out fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid. At his old job his staff scrutinized orders for toner cartridges and office space. His new gig required him to police sprawling entitlement programs that pay out more than $2 billion in claims each day.

His first days on the job were a bit of a shock. Levinson found a bureaucracy that almost seemed engineered for exploitation. Everywhere he looked money was flying out the window because of weak or nonexistent oversight. Field investigators in Miami were close to rebellion because it often took three months to get their own department to hand over claims they suspected were phony. By the time the documents arrived, the criminals who’d filed the false papers had quit town and were on to the next scam. In Los Angeles, police stopped a group of young men tooling around in a Bentley with stacks of stolen Medicare cards in the trunk, the first evidence of an Armenian mafia whose multimillion-dollar Medicare scheme would spread to 25 states. “There were a lot of sham operations,” Levinson says. “Billing was way out of whack with the demographics.” To keep up, he decided to rebuild his office from scratch.