We’re often told that the motivation behind “welfare fraud” is mostly greed, but when you look at the realities of recipient “welfare fraud”, most of it is rooted in desperation caused by horrific social and economic conditions.

Studies published in the eleven-year period since welfare reform was enacted [prior to this report, published in 2008] largely demonstrate that the majority of welfare recipients continue to be low-income women who are working hard to survive in a globalized capitalist economy (Johnson, 2000; Thomson, 2002). In the midst of this struggle, women have been found to break the welfare rules in order to support themselves and their children, sometimes knowingly and sometimes unwittingly because they are confused by the rules (Edin & Lein, 1997; Gilliom, 2005; Gustafson, 2005; Thomson, 2002; Wright, 1998).

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Consistent with the findings of Edin and Lein’s Making Ends Meet (1997), parents like Yolanda failed to report income because they did not have enough money to provide for their families, “I did not report because I did not have enough money to pay the rent, children’s expenses, and my ill mother’s expenses.. .it was a lot what I paid, and I did not have enough money. That is why I did it.” Gisela made a similar decision not to report income. She needed money to pay her deceased father’s debts and son’s legal expenses, but once those debts were paid, she contacted her worker about the income that she had not reported as a means of dealing with otherwise unmanageable debt. Thus, our findings reveal that women seek additional work or remuneration to enable family survival and may fail to report it out of fear that they may be unable to support their families should the additional income result in either losing their welfare benefits or having their cash aid reduced. Women also fear losing access to health care under Medicaid because most of their employers, and the low-wage labor market generally, are unlikely to provide health benefits for them or their family members.

Stories like this are common

Melissa Elliott was married with two children and one grandchild in her home when the Kern County District Attorney’s Office said she lied on a welfare application so she would receive food stamps for which she would not otherwise qualify.

Her then-husband was working at the time, but she said they still struggled to feed their family.

She said she was told by the welfare office that their household income was $50 too much for them to receive assistance. So, in what she describes as a desperate move to feed her family, Elliott returned to the welfare office and refiled papers, noting that she and her husband had separated. In reality, her marriage wasn’t well, but they hadn’t separated.

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Elliott said her family wasn’t rich before the welfare and certainly didn’t become wealthy while she was receiving it. If she could do it again, she said now that she’d be truthful on the application.

The pantry was empty in the days before payday, and dinner became a sad exercise in stretching out a can of soup. Candice, about three months pregnant, finally revealed that she had an Oklahoma EBT card from when she was single that was debited $426 each month in federal food assistance. David had never seen a welfare application, but he welcomed the help. “Food stamps didn’t make us wealthy,” he says. “Food stamps help feed your kids. Not totally feed them, but help feed them.”

Welfare recipients are responsible for notifying caseworkers of any changes to their household size or income, but Candice had only reported her marriage a year after the wedding, following the arrival of their new son. The Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) determined David’s income was too high for the family to receive benefits. The income threshold for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is about $35,000 a year for a family of five, and does not factor in custody payments. One caseworker suggested to Candice that she get a divorce.

“When she told me about that it was like somebody freaking stabbed me. I thought he was hitting on my wife,” David says. He stopped working overtime, but his base monthly pay was still about $150 too much. “That’s when the 45-day deal came in,” David says. Separated single parents with little means of their own can rely on public assistance to escape undesirable relationships. A caseworker said if Candice and the children lived apart from David for 45 days at a time, it would appear on paper that the couple had split. They certainly didn’t like the idea, but David and Candice needed help buying food, so Candice and the kids moved in with her mother.

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Candice and David knowingly skirted the law, but given how readily their caseworker suggested the wily subterfuge, they were unprepared for how dire the consequences could be. According to Gustafson, “When it comes to violating the welfare rules, most welfare recipients are damned if they do and doomed if they don’t.”

In a study of people convicted of welfare fraud, 73% would have met the income requirements for welfare even with the unreported income, often this misreporting is about navigating a nonsensical paperwork mountain, not even necessarily receiving more end benefits than would be allowed..

Also, it is virtually impossible to survive on TANF alone, forcing many recipients to have to commit “fraud” of unreported income to survive. 

Poor mothers who resort to other means of survival are also heavily criminalized.

Poor families who do not have access to public benefits face extreme poverty.

There are millions of families in the US whose incomes are too high to qualify for food stamps who cannot afford food.

“Welfare fraud” by recipients is far more likely to look like people being charged for illegally receiving housing, food, or healthcare than it is to look like the absurd stereotypes of mansions and cadillacs.

Welfare fraud charges are modern day poor laws, they criminalize survival and poverty.  What would you do if lying on a government form could keep your children from going hungry?  What would you do if it meant you could access a medicine you need to live?

Talking about a right to healthcare, housing, food, etc. is meaningless if you throw away the desperate measures poor people take to access basic needs for themselves and their families.

The fact that “progressives” and leftists are only supposed to emphasize how uncommon welfare fraud is in discussions of welfare allows the horrific unjust, cruel, bigoted, and often flat out arbitrary nature of welfare fraud laws and welfare fraud convictions to go largely uncommented on in any forum beyond conversations between poor people (and even then, often only between poor women and poor trans people).

The welfare rules and application system combined with legal system mean that virtually any welfare applicant can be criminalized at the drop of a hat even when they are actively trying to follow the rules and are not breaking them out of necessity to survive.  There’s a massive state surveillance system that targets people applying for assistance, and in practice poor people have few to no rights against it.  And all of that is increased to a huge degree, and often directly and specifically targeted at, people of color, immigrants, disabled people, and other oppressed or stigmatized groups of poor people.

You need to actually start to look at how welfare fraud surveillance, charges, and convictions work rather than just treat people subjected to them as sacrifices on the alter of looking like respectable poor people.

I mentioned some of the surveillance earlier, but I want to delve into this deeper, as well as talk about what welfare fraud charges tend to look like in practice.

It’s basically impossible to underestimate the level of surveillance that poor people are subjected to in the name of investigating/preventing welfare fraud.

From a 2009 paper on Criminalization of Poverty

To prevent fraud, welfare administrators collect vast amounts of information about welfare recipients and their families. Those who want to receive welfare have to fill out extensive paperwork at the time of their initial application and again every twelve months for their annual renewal of aid. In addition, they have to submit monthly and quarterly forms describing any changes in their income or household circumstances. Problems with paperwork routinely tie up assistance payments for recipients.

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The 1996 federal welfare reform legislation required states to institute fraud prevention programs.  The legislation did not, however, specify what the fraud prevention programs should look like. The three most populous states-California, New York, and Texas-as well as some other states instituted biometric imaging, in most cases fingerprint imaging programs, as part of their welfare fraud control measures. These biometric data collection requirements have been applied, depending on the state, to recipients of food stamps, TANF grants, and General Assistance grants (available to indigent adults without children). Individuals who apply for cash aid or food stamps in these states are required to submit fingerprints and sometimes photographs-through an electronic imaging system. 

From Welfare, Privacy, and Feminism:

The welfare system strips poor women of privacy not simply as a necessary precondition for processing applications, but also to reinforce the subjugation of the poor. The government has historically sought to make public assistance so stingy and so unappealing that few will bother to apply. At the same time public policy punishes women who do not fit the patriarchal norm of a married, two-parent family with a male breadwinner. Privacy invasions are a primary tactic for stigmatizing welfare and single motherhood.

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Significantly, TANF requires that recipients work within two years of receiving benefits, although most states impose a shorter timeframe. Still, even though T ANF recipients must now work in exchange for welfare benefits, they continue to face the same sorts of stigma and   privacy deprivations that were rampant under AFDC, and the advent of new technologies has only exacerbated the situation. 

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Poor women suffer tangible harms - psychological, material, and physical - as a result of the welfare system’s intrusions into their privacy. To begin with, the system of surveillance causes welfare recipients to suffer psychological injuries including stress, fear, and feelings of degradation. Studies have shown that poor women resist welfare surveillance in subtle but widespread ways in order to care for their families, such as by earning unreported income to supplement meager welfare checks. While this resistance to surveillance defends individual autonomy in the face of the state’s power, it also causes women even further stress due to the fear of getting caught and possibly losing benefits or being punished criminally. 

To deny the government vast amounts of information, including physical information (such as genetic testing, fingerprints, etc.) and resist coercive policies around pregnancy and birth, a person need to be committing “welfare fraud” in response to surveillance nominally existing to “prevent welfare fraud”.

Other measures enacted include things like tracking people’s vehicles and the  “home visits”

The home “walk-throughs” are also particularly intrusive and arbitrary. People can and have been denied benefits for a number of inappropriate reasons, including when agents discovered an extra toothbrush, boxer shorts, extra-large t-shirts, or boots. Investigators assumed, in error, that these things indicated that the applicant had failed to report the wages of a hidden wage-earner who lived with the family. Domestic violence survivors have been denied benefits when investigators said they didn’t have enough belongings to prove they lived in the home, even though they had recently fled there to avoid violence.

Home visits only occur if the application contains no signs of fraud or inconsistent information. If actual fraud is suspected, the applicant is subjected to other anti-fraud measures, and P100 does not apply

Regulation of the lives of the poor has spread out from “the brutal TANF regime, [where] the provision of actual income assistance has been overshadowed by the imposition of rules and services to regulate poor mothers’lives”.

“Welfare fraud” investigations of individual recipients are often expensive and, if their actual goal was finding “fraud” have extremely unimpressive results.  They routinely violate the law, and collude with welfare offices to do so even though they are allowed to do things that are otherwise considered Constitutional violations (the Courts like to say that submitting to these invasions is “voluntary” because a person could choose not to apply for benefits and starve instead-here’s a basic legal discussion which uses the absurd notion of “consent” at the threat of loss of housing, food, healthcare, etc.).

Here’s one example of retribution against welfare recipients for complaints about other state agents (a case that did result in a conviction of the welfare recipient):

At her next visit to OKDHS, an investigator named Christopher Comer pulled Candice and her mother into his office. With an annual budget of $5 million, Oklahoma’s inspector general employs 30 deputized welfare fraud investigators — fully sanctioned law enforcement officials carrying badges and guns. From behind a large wood-topped desk, Agent Comer looked at Candice and said, “That was my wife that you reported.” Apparently, Lisa, his wife and Candice’s caseworker, had been disciplined for her handling of [Candice’s] child’s case. Then he told them that Candice was committing food stamp fraud by living in two residences. Candice tried to explain, but Agent Comer said he had all the evidence he needed to convict her. “What are we supposed to do about this?” Coon asked. He told them to get their food stamps, and the two women left the office shaken and confused.

Even in cases where a large scale fraud is found, like this one by an attorney, these wide drag nets result in deaths and suffering of hundreds of others, without any proof of rules violation.

Innocent defendants often lack resources to dispute charges.

Often, women did not have a solid understanding of their rights or legal procedures. And even when they felt they were innocent, taking their case to trial risked conviction, not only for fraud but also for perjury, a much more serious offense. In such circumstances, plea agreements were routinely encouraged by public defenders. Traumatized by accusations of fraud and perjury and the consequences of conviction, plea agreements were taken as the only viable option, even by defendants who felt strongly that they were innocent. Only very rarely did The Untold Story of Welfare Fraud cases go to trial. 

The legal system is stacked against people charged with welfare fraud.

This is what is being done to poor people, and this is why I will not use “welfare fraud is super rare” as my primary argument.  Welfare fraud laws are a violent injustice, this is a textbook example of an oppressive legal system and I will not base my ethical judgment around whether or not a poor person can manage to navigate these rules without being made a victim of those charges.  Almost all of us who receive any form of welfare are just one vicious state agent or neighbor away from being a “welfare fraud”, no matter what we do.

General fraud and tax fraud are both far, far more common than welfare “fraud” (and they tend to be more narrowly defined, it the nonsense people call fraud for welfare was considered fraud it general, fraud numbers would skyrocket).  And yet “welfare fraud” gets widely reported and treated as a constant whereas tax fraud and general fraud are treated as rare acts by an occasional criminal and not emblematic of either general existence or as an indictment of the entire idea of taxes.

The obsession around “welfare fraud” is based on hatred of poor people (and a large amount of racism thrown in there too) and is meant to encourage hate and violence (including imposing deprivation) against poor people.