Fighting fraud at PRM

It’s been a year since I started my position with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM). First as a resettlement & placement program officer, then as the overall grant officer representative and anti-fraud and integrity officer. It’s a mouth full, it’s a domestic job, and I’m doing it remotely from The Gambia. Maybe because of that, many people seem to assume I’m not a diplomat anymore or I was never one to begin with!

Though I agree that it’s a unique position and somewhat of an unusual job for a foreign service officer. The only reason I’m able to fill a domestic position remotely (instead of being in Washington DC) is because I’m married to another FSO and our embassy in The Gambia is too small to accommodate both of us (because of anti-nepotism rules). The fact that I work for a humanitarian bureau is special because it’s not one of the five generalist career tracks.

Still a consular officer

The U.S. Department of State is bigger and more complex than most people expect. We have by far the most diplomats of any country, and we reshuffle into new positions every two years on avarage. Policy shifts create new offices every four years, and even with the reorganization in 2025 we still have many different functional bureaus on topics like energy, oceans, intelligence, and human rights. PRM is one of these bureaus and nowadays, with so much going on around the migration issue, it’s going through a lot of policy changes.

My position with PRM is for three years. The idea is to bring my years of overseas work experience and consular processing knowledge to bear on the niche that I’m currently in, which happens to be fraud prevention. It’s not the portfolio I applied for in the pre-reorganization world, but it’s the one I ended up with after a year of restructuring and internal discussions. It’s nice to finally settle into a role I can bite my teeth in for the next two years.

I’m still a consular officer though, officially. That’s my speciality and, so far, what I’ve enjoyed doing most in my seven years as a foreign service officer. I like that it’s closely related to what I’m doing now, which is assisting people (refugees in this case) to travel to the US legally and safely, while protecting our country’s borders and resources, and implementing policy changes.

Refugees and fraud

Before starting this job, I never thought of fraud being a problem in our refugee program (USRAP). When I’m writing that now it seems completely naive. A program with a large budget and huge potential benefit (a free immigration path to the US) is obviously at risk of bad actors and mismanagement!

I also should have known that from my consular work, where rule bending and outright scams were the order of the day in some of the places I’ve worked. At the moment, it doesn’t seem like there are boatloads of criminals undermining our every move, but there are always a handful of crazy and dangerous people to deal with at any given time, a lot of checks and balances to be carried out, and a large gray area where people don’t actually qualify for the program, or they qualify on technical grounds but are still a risk or large burden to the program.

Transferable skills

When I first started in this role, as fraud prevention and grants oversight officer, I felt like I was mostly taking up space. In fact, a not-so-diplomatic colleague said something to me along those lines, presumably not because she knew anything about me, but because this type of work can be technical in nature. You can’t just manage millions of dollars and dozens of implementers, and keep an eye on everything that might go wrong in the refugee program (which has just undergone massive downsizing and shifted focus to South Afrikaners as the primary and entirely new refugee population) without going through a very steep learning curve first.

One year later, though, I feel like I’m as well placed as anybody to do these things. Sure, there are a few people left in the office who know the history of the bureau, which is invaluable, who can do things twice as fast as I can. But I have enough knowledge and experience to understand what’s going on and be effective. I worked for PRM before, in Pakistan, coordinating Afghan refugee resettlement on the ground. I’m a well trained consular officer, which means I understand pretty much all of the myriad ways in which people travel and migrate to the US. I’ve lived in eight different countries, including two in Africa, so I know the work environment and atmospherics. As a Dutch-born U.S. citizen with a degree in history, I even had pretty good prior background knowledge about politics and culture in South Africa.

What’s more, I’m enjoying the work of a fraud officer. It’s so much more than dealing with a scammer or a crooked employee every once in a while. It’s more like developing and fine tuning an entire framework in which every existing and every new part of the program, which involves thousands of people and millions of dollars, is free from corruption, waste, negative external influences, misinformation, etc.

The tools we use range from screening applicants for potential risks and harmful past behavior to anti-fraud training, fake document identification, internal and external communication, writing procedural guidance, meeting with implementers, analyzing fraud trends, identifying people trying to make money from the program, responding to fraud tips and allegations, following the media, gathering statistics, and coordinating investigations by other agencies and our teams overseas.

It’s not all bad

For some reason I imagined working on fraud issues would make me jaded. Every day, I’m confronted with all the ways in which our government program isn’t foolproof, and probably never will be. I’m identifying applicants who nobody would ever want to deal with. It’s easy to get mad sometimes. But after a while, a bigger picture emerges.

It’s pretty evident to me now that no matter what the situation is, whether people are on the run because they fear for their life or come from a relatively stable situation where they still have a house and a job, people are going to be people. Some have incredible resilience and resourcefulness, while others make poor decisions, don’t understand the process, or feel entitled to things they were never promised. Propaganda and fury exists on all sides of all problems, the loudest voices are always listened to more than those of the quiet majority. Wherever you make friends, you make a few enemies too. Instead of feeling sad, I like to deal with the world as it is, in all of its complexity.

I’m not sure I’ll stick around in the fraud department forever, but for now I’m in the right place, even though it was unexpected (my original job entailed managing  humanitarian aid flows to Palestine refugee camps, a whole different business!). I assume I’ll work for the consular bureau again soon enough, and whatever I learn here will be very useful if I wanted to focus on fraud in the future. But it’s too early to think about that now. We’re not bidding on new jobs until next year!