The war on fraud is really a war on the poor

Every few years, Washington rediscovers fraud.

A viral clip of someone misusing food stamps. A headline about child care providers in Minnesota. A politician promising to crack down on “fraud and abuse.” The ritual is familiar. And the response is always the same: more paperwork, more surveillance, more hoops to jump through for people who are already struggling.

But this cycle misses a deeper truth. Fraud isn’t simply a problem within our safety net. It has become a governing logic that shapes how benefits are designed, administered and enforced.

The United States has long organized its anti-poverty programs around one overriding assumption: that poor people are likely to cheat. That assumption quietly shapes everything from cash assistance to food benefits to bankruptcy law. It determines who gets audited, who gets investigated and who must prove, over and over, that they are telling the truth.

And it comes at a cost. Consider the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the country’s most important anti-poverty tools. Low-income families who claim it are audited at dramatically higher rates than wealthy taxpayers — not because they are more dishonest, but because they are cheaper to audit. IRS officials have said so openly: Auditing a poor family takes hours; auditing a wealthy household takes weeks.

The same story plays out across programs. Families applying for food assistance must document income, housing and household composition — then recertify every few months. Miss a deadline or misunderstand a form and your benefits can vanish — not because you committed fraud, but because you failed to navigate an administrative maze designed to catch it.

Cash welfare is starker. After decades of fraud rhetoric and “reform,” only about one in five eligible families now receives any cash assistance, and benefit levels fall far short of covering basic needs. This didn’t happen by accident. We built systems that prioritize detecting hypothetical cheaters over helping struggling families.

And the irony is this: Actual fraud by benefit recipients is rare. SNAP, for example, has high payment accuracy: Over 95 percent of participants are eligible, and improper payments — most of which are errors, not fraud — make up only a small fraction of spending. Willful recipient fraud is rarer still. In cash welfare, intentional fraud is estimated at similarly low levels. And in consumer bankruptcy — another area reshaped by fears of abuse — only a tiny fraction of criminal referrals result in charges.

We have constructed a massive enforcement apparatus to root out a small minority, and in the process, we have made life materially harder for millions.

And there’s another side to this story that rarely makes the headlines: Low-income people are not just treated as potential fraudsters. They are also disproportionately victims of fraud.

Fraudsters target those living in poverty with fake debt relief, disaster relief cons and identity theft schemes. A single scam can trigger eviction, job loss or financial collapse. Yet when low-income families are defrauded, the legal system rarely rushes to their aid. Remedies are slow, fragmented and often inaccessible without lawyers.

So we end up with a cruel double bind: Families in poverty are aggressively policed in the name of fraud prevention, while left on their own when fraud actually harms them. That is not an accident. It reflects a deeper truth about how America governs poverty. We treat allegations of wrongdoing by the poor as urgent matters of enforcement. We treat wrongdoing against low-income people as regrettable but marginal.

This approach also corrodes trust. When every interaction with the government begins with suspicion — when benefits arrive late, disappear without warning or require endless proof — people learn that institutions are not there to help them. They disengage. They stop applying.

None of this means fraud should be ignored. Public programs need safeguards. Taxpayer dollars matter. But fraud losses are a cost of doing business in every system — from corporate accounting to defense contracting. We don’t respond to those risks by forcing CEOs to recertify their eligibility every six months or freezing entire programs over isolated scandals. We reserve that treatment for those living in poverty, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

We could modernize benefit delivery so families don’t have to re-prove the same facts to multiple agencies. We could invest in real fraud prevention — secure data systems, smarter coordination — without turning poverty assistance into a regime of surveillance.

And we could stop designing policy around caricatures. The “welfare queen” of the Reagan era never represented typical recipients. Neither does today’s viral fraud story. Yet these myths drive decisions that shape millions of lives.

Fraud has become more than a policy concern. It is a governing logic. And until we reckon with that, America’s safety net will treat poverty less as a condition to be addressed than as a behavior to be policed.

Sara Sternberg Greene is a professor of law at Duke University School of Law and is an expert in poverty law and inequality.