Imagine having a job that pays $80,000 a year, requires almost no qualifications, and allows you to spend most of your working day doing whatever you please.
You don't have to sit in an office, punch a time clock at a factory, or even show up for work in any meaningful sense. Just drive to somebody's house, tap a few buttons on your phone, and let the government handle the payments.
Sound too good to be true? Apparently, somebody forgot to tell the American taxpayer.
An explosive new investigation by The Daily Wire has exposed what appears to be a brazen Medicaid home-care scam in Pennsylvania. And the details are enough to make any working American wonder how many more people are collecting government payments for services they never perform.
The Daily Wire investigation, conducted by reporter Luke Rosiak, focused on Ram Kuma Chhetri, a Bhutanese refugee living in the Harrisburg area.
Chhetri was supposedly working as a personal-care aide, helping an older woman with everyday activities such as cooking, cleaning and other household tasks.
The arrangement was funded through Medicaid, which allows qualifying beneficiaries to receive assistance in their homes rather than move into more expensive institutional care.
But Rosiak's surveillance reportedly captured a rather different routine.
"Home care" has quickly become the *most common job in blue states*. This video shows why: Because people are billing Medicaid $80k+ a year for work that they aren't actually doing. Watch this refugee pull into a driveway for 2 minutes each day to trick the GPS anti-fraud system: pic.twitter.com/XJXSIUNtNx
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) October 30, 2026
Every morning around 6 AM, Chhetri would pull into a driveway, sit in his vehicle for a few minutes, and leave. At approximately 5 PM, he would return, spend another couple of minutes in the car, and head home.
That was apparently enough to create the impression of an 11-hour workday.
Pennsylvania's Electronic Visit Verification system uses location-enabled electronic records to document when workers begin and end their shifts.
But there's an obvious weakness in that arrangement: A GPS record showing a phone near someone's home doesn't establish that 11 hours of care actually occurred between the two check-ins.
And that distinction becomes awfully important when taxpayers are footing the bill.
According to The Daily Wire, the 11-hour daily schedule could generate approximately $82,600 annually in Medicaid payments. Those are payments associated with the billed services, not necessarily the worker's take-home salary, because home-care agencies retain a portion.
But the investigation uncovered something even more remarkable. Records obtained by Rosiak reportedly showed Chhetri billing for another client across town during overlapping hours.
Taken together, the two sets of claims represented approximately $160,000 annually in government-funded services. Apparently, the easiest way to work two jobs at once is to avoid showing up for either of them.
Rosiak confronted Chhetri with footage of his brief driveway visits. His daughter acknowledged that sometimes he simply went to the house and left, while maintaining that he performed care at other times. Chhetri suggested that he occasionally went shopping for his client, although the footage reportedly showed him arriving and departing without delivering groceries.
There was another curious detail. The woman living at the first residence, Dilu Monger, reportedly told Rosiak that her aunt received eleven hours of daily assistance. But when he arrived shortly before the supposed caregiver's shift ended, Monger declined to allow him to see either the worker or the recipient.
She also indicated that government inspections were arranged in advance. That seems like a rather convenient feature for anyone hoping to avoid an unexpected visit.
The investigation became even more complicated when Rosiak began examining the relationships between the clients, caregivers and home-care company.
Chhetri identified his employer as Gaunley Home Care, a company owned by Biras Adhikari, who told The Daily Wire that his agency received approximately $150,000 a month from Medicaid for 25 clients.
Adhikari said most of the company's business involved relatives caring for other family members. And that creates a serious oversight problem.
"If we are doing everything right on our side, like punch-in and punch-out from the location and submitting the timesheet, and the client is saying they are receiving the service and everything, there is no way for us to find out," Adhikari told The Daily Wire.
He suggested lawmakers should address those weaknesses and even supported eliminating arrangements in which relatives are paid to provide care.
But Americans don't have to rely exclusively on a journalist's investigation to see how pervasive the broader problem has become. The Justice Department has been prosecuting similar schemes for years.
In August, federal prosecutors announced that Philadelphia-based Blessings 4 Ever Home Care Agency and a related management company agreed to pay $1 million to resolve allegations involving falsified personal-care documentation and Medicaid billing for patients who were actually hospitalized.
The government alleged that the companies submitted claims based on inaccurate records, including charges for services that could not have occurred as represented.
And another Pennsylvania investigation uncovered allegations involving a home-care aide named Charles Bowie.
Federal prosecutors charged Bowie in connection with approximately $592,000 in Medicaid claims for services purportedly provided between 2016 and 2019.
According to the indictment, much of the billing was fraudulent because Bowie was not actually caring for his client. Among his other activities were multiple trips overseas.
Imagine having such a generous attendance policy that you can collect payments for working in Pennsylvania while vacationing in another country.
The same federal crackdown identified another Philadelphia-area aide, Sean Murray, who allegedly caused more than $400,000 in home-care claims to be submitted while engaging in activities unrelated to caring for clients.
Prosecutors said those activities included traveling for pleasure, exercising at the gym, attending social engagements and sleeping.
He was also accused of paying kickbacks to clients who participated in the arrangement.
In Minnesota, federal authorities have uncovered numerous schemes involving Medicaid-funded personal assistance and related services.
One defendant, Ahmed Agwa, was charged with submitting claims for more than 3,400 hours of personal-care services while the recipient was outside the country, along with hundreds of hours allegedly worked while Agwa himself was abroad.
Other claims involved services supposedly provided after the recipient had died.
Another defendant, Shawki Elsaid, was accused of submitting more than 1,600 fraudulent claims, including using other people's identities to document services that never occurred.
The Justice Department also announced charges involving a Minnesota home-care business that allegedly collected approximately $1.4 million for community-support services, some of which were never provided.
As I reported earlier, federal prosecutors have uncovered elaborate operations in which foreign nationals paid thousands of dollars to participate in staged robberies, hoping to qualify for immigration benefits reserved for victims of certain crimes.
Some of those fraudulent performances involved actual gunfire and serious injuries.
And just this week, the Justice Department announced another nationwide investigation, dubbed Operation Ghostbusters, targeting criminals who allegedly used stolen American identities to create nonexistent college students and collect federal financial aid.
As my RedState colleague Jennifer Oliver O'Connell reported Thursday, investigators announced five defendants and the seizure of more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency connected to the student-aid operation.
The alleged scheme involved fabricating college enrollment records, applying for federal financial aid and diverting the proceeds.
In other words, fake victims, fake students and fake caregivers are all capable of generating real government payments.
Digital payments have made government transactions faster and more convenient. But moving money electronically doesn't guarantee the underlying transaction is legit.
Those are different schemes exploiting the same basic vulnerability: Government employees processing enormous volumes of transactions cannot personally verify every event on which a payment or benefit depends.
Federal investigators have made the scale of the problem difficult to ignore.
The Government Accountability Office has estimated that fraud across federal programs costs taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion annually, based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.
That is a mind-blowing amount of money to lose while Washington continues borrowing heavily and politicians argue over taxes and spending.
As I previously reported, the Trump administration has been expanding federal fraud investigations and prosecutions.
The president also recently announced a whistleblower incentive program intended to encourage Americans to report suspected theft from government programs.
There is a larger lesson about our increasingly centralized system of government spending.
When politicians create welfare programs funded through the federal government's nearly unlimited capacity to borrow, overseen by Byzantine bureaucracies and doled out through electronic payments, this creates a system that is inherently ripe for fraud and abuse.
So, while politicians continue debating how much more Washington should spend, some of the most profitable jobs in America involve doing absolutely nothing.
The American taxpayer is working overtime. The question is how many people collecting taxpayer money are working at all.
