LAWRENCE CO. – In a case that’s not filed very often, a 36-year-old rural Bridgeport resident is facing a serious crime after authorities allege she lied to the public aid office.
Donita Yager, of 9904 Kings Hill Road in Bridgeport, was charged on December 14 with Public Assistance Recipient (welfare) Fraud.
The single-count charge alleges that between September 2013 and August 2014, Yager knowingly, by means of a false statement, obtained $6,022 in public aid under the Illinois Public Aid Code to which she was not entitled in that she failed to report her living with the father of her children and his employment income to Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS).
It’s been reported to Disclosure over the years that a vast number of people in Lawrence County operate in this way, and that they claim children who actually live with another parent, including children who live out of state (across the river in Indiana), as dependents.
According to Forbes magazine in an exposè written by former gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski of Kankakee, Illinois is a “death spiral” state, one of 11, which means that along with farm subsidy and other subsidized business recipients, Illinois has more “takers” than “makers”; in other words, more people receiving subsidies or welfare than there are people actually generating income who are NOT receiving.
Lawrence County has a high rate of welfare in Illinois per capita, according to statistics compiled every year by IDHS. Available statistics from the most recent year compiled (2013) show that 12 percent of the population are in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Lawrence (2,168 individuals) with participants receiving $3,395,700 in benefits. That’s just SNAP, however. There are also other welfare-related programs, including Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid (medical card), through which figures are more difficult to obtain; then add in Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and township “hardship” programs that people can go to for bill assistance, as well as ERBA (the Embarras River Basin Agency) energy assistance program, and there are all kinds of ways to defraud the government, which provides these programs on the backs of people who work for a living.
That Yager took in over six grand in less than a year could be indicative that she was using any combination of the above “programs” to prop up income, which could have gone unreported, or could merely have been “under the table,” as is often the case with these situations.
Quick is one of the few prosecutors in the area who will actually file such a charge after an investigation is conducted; Denton Aud in White County has filed these fairly consistently since he’s been in office.
Oftentimes if the state can’t get a prosecutor to actually file a felony charge (which is little but symbolic, as the state is going to extract whatever they’ve paid to a recipient out of their tax returns, hide, or possessions at some point in time in their life, regardless), they turn matters over to the attorney general’s office, who prosecutes from Springfield if it’s a case in the southern region of Illinois.
Yager’s charge is a Class 4 felony; she has no other discernible criminal history in Lawrence.
She’s been set for a bond hearing on January 20; a Brittany A. Jones was able to post $1,000 cash bond for her and she was released on the day a warrant was issued for her arrest, Dec. 15.