Editorial: LA County right to pause fraud-plagued settlement payments

Any incident of sexual abuse, most especially of a minor, is inexcusable, and not to be tolerated by our society.

And it’s a sign of health in our society that we now refuse to allow such abuse to be minimized and not addressed by responsible parties, including government social-service agencies that are supposed to protect citizens in their care.

On the one hand it’s understandable why many supported a 2019 California law, Assembly Bill 218, which lifted the statute of limitations on bringing abuse lawsuits against government agencies in the state which employed people who engaged in abuses in the course of their job.

But justice must be guided by the truth. This is the first of many problems with AB 218. With the long passage of time records can get lost, memories grow fainter, making it harder to tell which claims are true and which are not.

This only becomes messier as the pursuit of justice becomes intermixed with the pursuit of money. As ever when it comes to some greedy lawyers intent on abusing the system that is supposed to protect the victims of sexual or other abuse, there are plenty of opportunities for perpetrating fraud against government agencies and thus ultimately taxpayers.

Fraud on a massive scale is just what a Los Angeles Times investigation of some of the proposed coming payouts to alleged victims of sexual abuse while in the care of Los Angeles County has shown, and that’s why District Attorney Nathan Hochman is entirely right to ask the county to temporarily halt the first payments in a recent $4 billion sexual abuse settlement while his office investigates many potentially fraudulent claims.

That settlement decision came after the five members of the Board of Supervisors got legal advice telling them the claims had merit and needed to be made, even though the size of the payout would cripple the county budget, cause cuts to every department and likely require municipal bond sales to pay for it.

In retrospect, not enough questions were asked by the elected officials and by staff about the veracity of every claim, and about the methods used by law firms bringing claims by clients from whom they would also profit handsomely.

Supervisor Janice Hahn told us Wednesday she acknowledges the mistake: “I agree with the district attorney,” she said. “After the reports of fraud by one of the law firms, I think this is an important and necessary step to protect taxpayer dollars.”

Good intentions must not blind us to the plain fact that when there is so much money on the line, and so few guardrails, there will be opportunists who try to take advantage. In the interests of justice, we must not allow this to happen.