IHSS Fraud Is Real. So Are We.

This post is written in response to “This Kind of Fraud Has Been Happening for Decades in California” published April 23, 2026 in City Journal by Kenneth Schrupp.

I strongly encourage you to read the original article before continuing.

A recent article in City Journal set off a familiar alarm in my chest — the kind I get when someone who has never changed a brief, navigated a Medi-Cal denial, or spent three hours on hold with the county decides to explain what’s wrong with IHSS.

Let me be clear: IHSS fraud is real. It exists, it’s wrong, and frankly, it makes me furious. Not because an article said so, but because every dollar stolen from this program is a dollar that could have gone to someone like my son Tom, who has Coffin-Siris Syndrome and needs round-the-clock care. Fraud doesn’t just hurt the state. It hurts us — the caregivers who are doing this work honestly, invisibly, and for wages that would make most people laugh if they weren’t so busy crying.

What I take issue with is the framing.

The article quotes one anonymous source and presents a $12 billion annual fraud figure with zero citation. For context, IHSS’s entire budget is approximately $30 billion. The article is asking us to believe that 40% of the program’s funding disappears to fraud every year — and offers no data to back that up. That’s not investigative journalism. That’s a talking point dressed up as a story.

Here’s what the article got right: the solutions its own source recommends are reasonable. Better background checks. Unannounced visits. Databases that actually talk to each other. Cross-referencing addresses. Those are good ideas. Legitimate caregivers would welcome them. We have nothing to hide.

What the article got wrong is the target.

There are approximately 500,000 IHSS providers in California. The overwhelming majority of us are family members — parents, adult children, spouses — caring for someone we love because no one else will, and because the alternative is a facility that costs the state four to five times as much. We are not criminals looking for a loophole. We are people who gave up careers, sleep, social lives, and our own health to keep our family members at home and out of institutions.

I work more than 130 hours a week caring for my son. I am paid for 70. I have never once submitted a false timecard. And I am exhausted in ways that are genuinely difficult to describe to someone who has not lived this. This is what an IHSS caregiver’s day looks like. Legit caregivers don’t have time for naughty behavior.

Attacking IHSS as a program doesn’t fix fraud. It just makes it harder for people like me to justify continuing — and harder for legislators to defend funding that thousands of vulnerable Californians depend on to survive.

If you want to fix IHSS fraud, fix it. Implement the database cross-checks. Do the unannounced visits. Strengthen background checks. Prosecute the overlords. We will cheer you on.

Stop throwing the rest of us under the bus to make a political point.

We are here. We are real. And we are not going anywhere.

— Mary, IHSS caregiver, Santa Barbara County