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"Welfare fraud"
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Cheating Welfare
Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred--so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between.In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable--not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.
eBook
The shadow economy : an international survey
\"Illicit work, social security fraud, economic crime, and other shadow economy activities are fast becoming an international problem. This second edition uses new data to reassess currency demand and the model approach to estimate the size of the shadow economy in seventy-six developing, transition, and OECD countries. This updated edition argues that during the 2000s the average size of a shadow economy varied from 19% of GDP for OECD, to 30% for transition, and to 45% for developing countries\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Getting to Know You
State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These investigations hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing on interviews with welfare fraud workers in five U.S. states, this article shows how fraud investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use clients’ social ties against them. Investigators gain some information through elective cooperation, when people voluntarily implicate others. Fraud workers say these denunciations typically arise from negative-valence ties (bad blood). Other times, investigators co-opt neutral or positive-valence ties (good will) for enforcement purposes. This co-optation includes eliciting information from unwitting acquaintances and exploiting clients’ own online social networking activity. These findings demonstrate social ties’ appropriability, through which they serve as resources for relational outsiders’ interests. Repurposing welfare clients’ social ties for fraud enforcement presents a two-fold threat to subsistence and social mobility prospects: it imposes punishments—including program disqualifications—while simultaneously damaging social support networks. These enforcement practices reveal appropriability as an unrecognized property of social ties, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized people, and constitute a noteworthy element of contemporary poverty governance.
Journal Article
The Queen : the forgotten life behind an American myth
\"On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship--after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody--not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan--seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of the color of her skin. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin's mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the 'welfare queen' myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. [This book] tells, for the first time, the fascinating story of what was done to Linda Taylor, what she did to others, and what was done in her name.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Relational legal consciousness in the punitive welfare state: How Dutch welfare officials shape clients' perceptions of law
With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.
Journal Article
Algorithmic accountability: robodebt and the making of welfare cheats
PurposeThe paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power.FindingsIn exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of “self-management” and “individual responsibility”.Originality/valueThis paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities.
Journal Article
The Power of Second-Order Legal Consciousness
Legal authorities’ second-order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’second-order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second-order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ secondorder legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law-infused environments.
Journal Article
Population dynamics of welfare stigma: welfare fraud versus incomplete take-up
This study investigates the conditions under which welfare fraud and incomplete take-up emerge simultaneously and persist for a long time, which has been observed in many countries, particularly Japan and Germany. To do this, we extend models of statistical discrimination and taxpayers’ resentment to simple models of population dynamics. We find two stable boundary equilibria in the first model. One of these equilibria entails low welfare fraud and
100
%
incomplete take-up, and the other entails high welfare fraud and
100
%
take-up. In contrast, we find a unique stable equilibrium in the tax resentment model, which is interior and thus allows for the coexistence of welfare fraud and incomplete take-up in a long run. Hence, we conclude that this unique long-run equilibrium of the dynamic taxpayers’ resentment model provides a better explanation for the observation of simultaneous and persistent presence of welfare fraud and incomplete take-up in actual economies.
Journal Article
Framing and Shaming: The 2017 Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All Campaign
The repeated circulation of anti-welfare discourses has served to encourage limited and often incorrect public understandings of issues pertaining to welfare. Central to these processes is the social construction of notions of ‘deservedness’ and ‘undeservedness.’ In this article we examine the 2017 ‘Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All’ (original emphasis) campaign initiated by the Department of Social Protection in the Republic of Ireland. We present our analysis of the dominant discourses evident in the campaign itself and the in-house discussions in the lead up to the campaign. Our article shows that this Irish campaign rehearses a familiar international discourse which follows distinct patterns or rules, and we evidence, in keeping with other moral panics, the spurious nature of the data being used to exaggerate the scale and extent of welfare ‘fraud’.
Journal Article