Madison County woman sentenced for stealing benefits from disabled daughter

An East Alton woman was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison Friday morning for stealing more than $58,000 of her disabled daughter’s Social Security funds.

According to court documents filed in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Illinois, Melissa D. Wasylak, 49, applied for her disabled daughter to receive Supplemental Security Income benefits and asked that she be appointed her daughter’s representative payee.

Supplemental Security Income is administered by the Social Security Administration to provide a minimum level of income to aged, blind, and disabled individuals who have limited resources.

In 2008, Wasylak’s daughter, who has Down Syndrome moved out of the home shared with her mother and began living with Wasylak’s ex-husband. But Wasylak continued to receive her daughter’s SSI funds, according to the indictment.

From at least Nov. 1, 2011 through May 23, 2019, Wasylak defrauded the Social Security Administration in order to obtain her daughter’s benefits for her own personal use.

Federal law requires that all SSI funds must be used for the benefit of the disabled child.

As part of her guilty plea, Wasylak admitted that she did not use the funds for her daughter’s expenses, but instead used the funds to pay her own personal expenses. This continued until the situation was reported to the Social Security Administration in May of 2019.

In addition to the 14-month prison sentence, the court ordered Wasylak to serve two additional years of supervised release. The court also ordered Wasylak to pay $58,345 in restitution to the Social Security Administration.