WELFARE INMATES

When Missouri's state auditor, Margaret Kelly, decided to cross-check names of welfare recipients with names of prison inmates, she came up with some interesting matches -- 508 of them, to be exact, for May 1995. There just one problem: By law, prison inmates aren't entitled to welfare benefits.

Checking further, the auditor's office took a closer look at a sampling of 86 of the 508 names. The findings: 67 of those indicated welfare checks designated for prisoners were cashed to the tune of more than $40,000. Remember, this was just for one month, and it represents only a fraction of the total number of prisoners' names that turned up on the cross-checked list.

When Kelly announced to the public what she had learned, it created quite a ruckus at the Department of Social Services, where director Gary Stangler's first response was to call Kelly's probe a politically motivated witch hunt. His theory is that Kelly wants the GOP nomination for governor and needs to be in the news.

The point Stangler seems to be missing is that it is Kelly's job to keep track of the state's money and to ensure that it is being spent appropriately. Instead of a political reaction to the situation, Stangler's job is to find out how his department overlooked more than 500 recipients of aid to families with dependent children, food stamps and Medicaid payments who are in state prisons.

The total amount of misspent money hasn't been determined, but at the rate shown by Kelly's spot check, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year could be going for welfare in a sloppy system overseen by a director who only sees political motivation when it is called to his attention.

If anyone has turned Kelly's findings into a political witch hunt, it is Stangler, whose loyalties lie with his boss, Gov. Mel Carnahan. The governor also wants his share of headlines in this crucial election year, but the ones generated by Stangler probably aren't what he had in mind.