I ask because we had a situation in Ireland just like this many years ago. It was for welfare fraud specifically and faced criticism for a few reasons. One was that the suspected levels of fraud may have been much lower than the politician was claiming. The other reason was that the cost of tackling it could likely outweigh any savings.
The lack of specificty is also a strategy used to bolster support for deregulation.
Simply say “we are eliminating regulations” , and dont ever talk about what you are deregulating, because actually many regulations are a net good for society and were implemented for a reason. Preventing companies from dumping poison is a regulation.
The specifics matter, but generally no.
When an actual fraud investigation is being done into something major like a casino laundering money, my government tends not to turn it into a media circus until after investigations are underway.
When a politician tells me they want to ‘tackle fraud’, especially welfare fraud, I hear “I want to arrest people for being poor”. It sounds like a dog-whistle to me, because every time I hear it used, it’s by people bearing a “the cruelty is the point” mindset.
I would say probably yes, because if you leave something like that unenforced, people learn that they can get away with it and the trend spreads.
Sure the enforcement might cost more than it saves today, but it quite likely might cost less than it would cost once the problem expands 5-10 years from today.
I would not trust my government to tackle fraud/corruption no matter what they said
In the “drug test welfare applicants” it was more about putting extra hassles on poor people than a genuine fraud issue. Voter fraud is similarly an excuse to deny voting rights.
I’d say yes, because dishonesty shouldn’t be tolerated. They’re going after the million-dollar fraudsters as well, right?
Going after the rich people? Ah you made me laugh. No just poor people.
I would say there is two things at play here one is that you should have is simplifying the compliance requirements to make fraud easier to detect. Like for example in the US for disability if you have more than 2k in your bank account you lose disability.
All these requirements were created to show that a government will offer welfare when they really don’t want to. If we just said if you make less than X you get help. It would be simple math and a SQL query to check for fraud. At the same time having a fraud team in that looks at businesses doing the fraud would be better served like with the US Medicaid fraud that dwarfs any fraud coming from individuals.
Not unless they had a less expensive initiative to tackle the initiative too.
Would you think the same if it was about murder?
Of course not.
Depends. You could argue that economically speaking it’s not worthwhile to stop and cite people for speeding. Police do have discretion on that kind of thing so not the best example, but still, there’s probably stuff that isn’t good for the bottom line that just needs to happen. The government is not a business.
Now when I say “depends”, I would be more inclined to go after a small number of people committing massive fraud than a large number committing minor acts of fraud. In the first case I think charges would discourage future abuse but in the second probably not. It wouldn’t be a vast, organized network of people doing the same thing, but a bunch of people that happened to notice the same opportunity. I think you’d do just as well having applicants read and sign a paper that goes over the penalties of abuse (while spending very little resources on enforcement).
I’d support it because criminals shouldn’t be rewarded for their actions. If they are, more people would do it and now It’ll cost even more to stop everyone from doing it.
