Employees

Hi, my name is Jim Richardson with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance. I'm an Investigative Officer and the best thing about my job is the variety of people and situations I see in my day-to-day work. I'm an Investigative Officer and I review income assistance files for the Ministry and we want to make sure that all the people getting assistance are getting the correct amount.

All the income that people make in their life needs to be reported to us while they're receiving assistance. That's one of the larger areas of fraud or error, is not reporting income correctly. We use a variety of techniques to investigate income that's not being reported. I like the variety of it; it's problem solving. I get to use some creativity into how I search out files. I get a nice mix of client contact, paperwork and computer work.

When I first started the job I thought dealing with fraud or dealing with error and giving people bad news that money that they're getting, that they're used to getting, they're not going to continue getting it or we're cutting them off for one reason or another, that it would be a very stressful and conflict-laden job. And what's really neat about the job - it's actually very little conflict, surprisingly enough. It's much less conflict and actually service delivery. People are often very glad to have the issue over with, they feel like a weight's off their back, it's out in the open, it's dealt with and then they can move on with their life.

Your knowledge of human nature is a great asset in this job and people are always showing you new sides of themselves and yet the common stories you hear are limited, there are only so many stories. They all have variations and that's what helps you decide when a story fits or something doesn't fit. You don't always know why, but if you dig and you dig, very often, something will come out that you didn't know before that changes your analysis or changes your decision.