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COVID-19

Employee wins lawsuit filed by gov’t agency after losing job for refusing COVID shot

Published

2 months ago

4 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Emily Mangiaracina

The federal government successfully sued on her behalf, citing a Title VII violation.

A former assistant manager who was fired after applying for a religious accommodation to refuse the COVID shot has been awarded a six-figure payout after a federal government agency filed a lawsuit on the employee’s behalf.

Federal Judge M. Casey Rodgers on Thursday ordered the Pensacola, Florida store Hank’s Fine Furniture (HFI) to pay a former manager, identified in the lawsuit as “K.M.O.,” $110,000 for refusing to accommodate her request for exemption from the COVID shot due to her “sincerely held Christian beliefs.”

“HFI is permanently enjoined from discriminating against any employee on the basis of religion in violation of Title VII,” Rodgers wrote, the Pensacola News Journal reported Monday. He further declared that HFI “will reasonably accommodate employee and prospective employee religious beliefs during all hiring, discipline and promotion activities,” and “any activity affecting any other terms and conditions of employment.”

Significantly, the store also “cannot require proof that an employee’s or applicant’s religious objection to an employer requirement be an official tenet or endorsed teaching of said religious belief,” according to Pensacola News Journal.

Hank’s Furniture must also adopt a written policy, disseminated to all employees, declaring that HFI “will not require any employee to violate sincerely held religious beliefs, including those pertaining to vaccinations, as a condition of his/her employment.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sued on behalf of K.M.O. (EEOC v. Hank’s Furniture, Inc., Case No. 3:23-cv-24533-MCR-HTC) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida after it was unable to reach a pre-litigation settlement “through its administrative conciliation process.”

According to Pensacola News Journal, about two weeks after HFI implemented a policy mandating that its employees receive a COVID shot, K.M.O. told the company she would not get the shot due to her “sincerely held religious beliefs,” and then requested a religious exemption.

According to the lawsuit, HFI ignored her request and asked if she would comply with their COVID shot policy, and K.M.O. then told HFI she planned to submit a written religious accommodation request, asking “whether HFI had a particular form she should use.”

HFI reportedly did not respond to her request. When K.M.O. complained that HFI’s unwillingness to grant her a religious exemption was “unjust,” her new supervisor reportedly told her that “HFI did not care why she would not take” the COVID shot and that HFI “would never grant an accommodation.”

When K.M.O. emailed HMI on September 6, 2021, asking for the status of her religious exemption request, HFI informed her that her religious exemption request was “severely lacking,” and then denied it.

K.M.O. then “asked for help to submit an acceptable religious exemption request,” but HFI refused to discuss any accommodation, according to the lawsuit. Then on October 31, she was fired by HFI because she did not comply with their COVID “vaccination” policy.

Birmingham District Director Bradley Anderson remarked regarding the case for an EEOC press release, “Employees should not have to renounce their religious beliefs in order to remain employed. Let this case serve as a reminder that employers should afford accommodation for religious beliefs unless doing so would cause an undue hardship.”

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COVID-19

‘Mind-boggling’: Billions gone and little to show for it years after rampant COVID fraud

Published on September 15, 2024

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From The Center Square

By 

“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

Years after the passage of federal COVID-era relief and the subsequent loss of likely hundreds of billions of those taxpayer dollars, lawmakers are still unsure where that money went, how to get it back, and seemingly have done little to prevent it from happening again.

Federal watchdog and other reports estimate anywhere from $200 billion to half a trillion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse across various federal and state COVID-era programs.

“Insiders, including those who worked for state workforce agencies, conspired with organized crime factions and other individuals to defraud state UI programs and the states did little to stop them,” a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report released this week said. “Some states even hired individuals convicted of identity theft to process UI claims.”

Examples like that and the scope of the amount lost was the subject of a House Oversight hearing this week where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and experts grappled with the scope of the lost funds and what to do about it.

“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

The most common among those tactics was stealing unemployment dollars doled out by the federal government during the pandemic.

One inspector general report from the Small Business Adminstration estimated at least $200 billion in taxpayer money was lost.

“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans,” the report said. “This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”

Nearly all of those “fraudulent actors” have so far gotten away with the theft.

Congress approved $40 million for the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, tasked with finding and preventing fraud. That committee and other investigative efforts have shown the COVID-era fraud was rampant and that little has been done to recover those funds.

That committee’s authority expires next year.

“Every dollar that goes to a fraudster doesn’t go to the small business, to the unemployed, to others that Congress were intending to help,” Michael Horowitz, Chair of PRAC, said at the oversight hearing this week. “If we want to continue to advance the fight against improper payments and fraud, we shouldn’t allow this important and fraud fighting tool to expire.”

Horowitz also said at the hearing that there is “clearly insufficient” access to data for oversight, such as accessing Social Security Administration’s death database so that payments are not sent to deceased individuals. He also pushed for his authority to be expanded to helping other agencies.

Orice Williams Brown, chief operating officer at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, also testified at the hearing that federal agencies can do more to prevent fraud of this kind. But federal agencies are not alone in the blame.

The House Oversight report released this week is called the “Widespread Failures and Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs” showing that states mishandled funds doled out by the federal government for unemployment insurance, sometimes with little oversight.

From the report:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates 11 to 15 percent of total benefits paid during the pandemic were fraudulent, totaling between $100 to $135 billion. The Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimates that at least $191 billion in pandemic UI payments could have been improperly paid, with a significant portion attributable to fraud. As of March 2023, states reported recoveries of improper payments in an amount of only $6.8 billion.

The design of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program led to massive fraud. During the program’s first nine months, claimants did not have to provide any evidence of earnings or prior work which made the program susceptible to fraud. DOL reported that the PUA program had a total improper payment rate of 35.9 percent.

Both sides have lamented the lost taxpayer dollars, but so far little has been done to prevent it from happening again, even as Congress continues to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills often with little time for lawmakers to review.

Lawmakers passed two bills in 2023 to increase reporting from federal agencies on fraud and to prevent those previously convicted of financial crimes from receiving certain federal payment.

The House Oversight report recommended stronger security measures, cross checking with other relevant databases, more oversight and transparency, and more documentation from benefit recipients.

“If this is not a call to action…” Sessions said at the hearing. “I simply do not know what is.”

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COVID-19

Andrew Cuomo had aides manipulate death stats to cover up COVID record, report finds

Published on September 15, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Republican Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the House subcommittee, explained that ‘the Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19’

Former New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo personally edited state COVID-19 statistics to downplay deaths caused by his placement of contagious people in nursing homes, a new congressional investigation found.

For months, New York was the hardest hit of any state by the pandemic, due in large part to the coronavirus spreading within the state’s nursing homes. Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 over sexual harassment claims, ordered that nursing homes cannot turn away patients diagnosed with COVID-19 despite the fact the virus was most dangerous to the elderly.

He initially tried to blame nursing home deaths on the Trump administration by claiming that a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance forced him to put the infected back in nursing homes (the CDC actually called for elderly housing decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis). But even the office of New York Attorney General (and fellow Democrat) Letitia James found Cuomo’s administration undercounted COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by as much as half.

A 2021 report by the Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly found that Cuomo and his senior aides edited state COVID-19 reports and undercounted nursing home deaths “on multiple occasions” to “strengthen the defense” of his order by excluding COVID deaths that occurred once patients left their nursing home.

On Monday, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a memo confirming those findings, National Review reported.

“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19,” subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup, a Republican from Ohio, said. “Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing.”

The committee found that Cuomo assistant Stephanie Benson emailed top aides to get out a “report on the facts” to prevent the governor’s nursing home directive from becoming a “great debacle in the history books. Cuomo has publicly denied involvement in creating the report, his former adviser, Jim Malatras, testified that Cuomo made his desires clear to the authors through his aids and handwritten notes, and even reviewed and edited the document himself multiple times.

Former New York State Department of Health official Dr. Eleanor Adams told investigators that her department did not independently author the report or was it peer reviewed. Others testified that the decision to remove out-of-facility deaths from the count came from the New York Executive Chamber, i.e., the governor’s cabinet.

Cuomo himself testified before the subcommittee this week, where he continued to maintain his innocence. He did, however, admit that he never spoke to anyone at the CDC or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services about the scientific justification for his nursing home directive before issuing it.

In May, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch penned an opinion identifying America’s COVID response measures as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” against which Congress, state legislatures, and courts alike were largely negligent to protect constitutional rights, personal liberty, and the rule of law.

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