State is soft on insurance cheats

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is failing to prosecute these white collar

cases. It needs more money, manpower.

Insurance cheats can steal tens of thousands of dollars at a time, but often they face little penalty in South Carolina. State lawmakers must put more money behind white collar crime enforcement. This state's consumers and businesses pay exorbitantly higher rates when fraud is allowed to flourish.

Without question, this state's failure to aggressively prosecute white collar crime makes South Carolina fertile ground for insurance fraud. Insurance industry experts and concerned lawmakers told The (Charleston) Post and Courier in a recent report that weak enforcement essentially makes the entire state a high-risk insurance pool. That drives up the cost of property and health coverage. It also drives up the cost of business coverage such as worker's compensation. That affects job creation and consumer prices for goods and services. It especially affects Greenville, one of the top three counties for this type of crime.

A good starting point for reform is a bill that will be reintroduced by Mauldin Rep. Dan Tripp that would create a $2.5 million funding pool from insurance carriers operating in South Carolina. The fund would be devoted to fighting fraud. The Office of the Attorney General, which is responsible for investigating and prosecuting these crimes through its insurance fraud division, is woefully underfunded and needs this help.

The insurance fraud division created by the Legislature in 1994 is overwhelmed. It, according to the Post and Courier, has just four employees — one attorney, an assistant and two agents from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. Last year, the agency fielded 844 fraud complaints. That's up 61 percent from the year before. It's a caseload that could keep growing as long as South Carolina is perceived as weak on enforcement.

Other states are far more generous in their support of fraud enforcement. North Carolina, for example, has two dozen employees in its fraud division that operates on a $1.8 million annual budget. Florida and Georgia have even larger enforcement units. And those states also have tougher penalties for all white collar crime, including insurance fraud.

The paltry $300,000 this state devotes to insurance fraud enforcement is more than inadequate. It's an invitation to criminals to defraud our consumers and business. The failure to provide such basic safeguards is — quite simply — bad government. This is why the state Legislature should be more deliberative in tough financial times and prioritize its spending. The Attorney General's office has been cut by about one-third over the past four years, most of the cuts coming from across-the-board measures that do not adequately weigh the consequences even smallest cuts can have on critical need agencies.

The fraud division qualifies. These often complicated cases can often require expensive forensic accountants and additional auditors, investigators and attorneys. Justice for the victims of these crimes shouldn't be compromised by our failure to adequately fund enforcement.

That's the price of inadequate enforcement. Justice is delayed. And no enforcement means no deterrent for others who see South Carolina as a state full of potential victims who have no one looking out for them.