Broke people, broken rules: Explaining welfare fraud investigators’ attributions

Abstract

There is a notable contrast between welfare clients’ and welfare fraud investigators’ accounts of rule breaking behaviors. Clients describe some actions (or inactions) that constitute rule violations as accidental, and tend to attribute others to situational factors: program rules’ complexity, the exigencies of day-to-day subsistence, and time and energy limitations. Fraud investigators, on the other hand, are comparatively likely to identify rule breaking as deliberate and cite clients’ dispositions to explain the behavior. In part, this disparity reflects the “fundamental attribution error,” the tendency to overestimate dispositional factors’ role in driving others’ behavior. However, evidence from interviews with welfare fraud workers from five US states reveals the impactful administrative and normative factors that encourage them to make and assert attributions of intentionality and dispositional motivation. First, administrative priorities foreground intentional violations: federal authorities financially incentivize deliberate fraud charges, and managers favor these cases, which permit client suspensions and disqualifications. Second, emphasizing internal motivations over situational pressures serves a valuable normative function, establishing punished clients’ blameworthiness and thus defending the legitimacy of both individual fraud workers and the units they compose. These findings demonstrate how policy structures and enforcement practices do not just respond to blameworthy or legally culpable behavior, but help construct narratives of blameworthiness and culpability.

Framing and Shaming: The 2017 Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All Campaign

“…By combining the words cheat and welfare, anti-fraud campaigns produce narratives that affect public understandings of the functionality, effectiveness and need for welfare programmes. Instead of encouraging empathy, generosity and universal well-being, by purposively omitting individual circumstances and the hardships people endure, those engaged in such campaigns not only demonise vulnerable members of our society (Lundström, 2013;Wilcock, 2014;Headworth, 2021), but also redirect the public's attention from the structural causes of poverty, effectively undermining the value of welfare programmes. In line with Wilcock (2014), our study shows that anti-fraud campaigns not only limit the issue of fraud to the market and individual ethics of welfare recipients, they also discourage any questioning of the state's continued need for surveillance of the 'suspects'.…”

“…Additionally, to rally 'the full weight of public opprobrium' against those caricatures that the myth has created, the threat that they pose also needs to be amplified (Morrisson, 2019: 255). Such framing processes are evidenced in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and the USA to name but a few countries, with political rhetoric about 'the welfare scrounger/skiver' and campaigns to address welfare fraud intensifying over the past decade (see, for example, Connor, 2007;Katz, 2013Katz, [1989; Jensen, 2014;Wilcock, 2014Wilcock, , 2019Scott and Masselot, 2018;Hansen, 2019;Headworth, 2021).…”

Ideology, Information, and Social Welfare Preferences

“…According to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB 1 ), in 2021, improper welfare payments, including welfare fraud and abuse, were estimated to be 15.2% (more than $160 billion) of all federal welfare payments. This rate varies widely for specific programs, from 9.3% for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2008 to 15.6% for Medicaid and 31.6% for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in 2022 (Headworth, 2021; Kim & Maroulis, 2018; Office of Management and Budget, 2023). Notably, the latter estimate does not subtract overpayments recovered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a recent and controversial measurement decision by OMB (Greenstein et al, 2019).…”

“…Our findings have important implications for the research on public opinion toward welfare programs. First, previous studies in this field often neglect the effects of vulnerabilities of welfare programs on citizens’ welfare attitudes, despite the considerable problems of the American welfare state (Andrade et al, 2019; Headworth, 2021; Kim & Maroulis, 2018). In this study, we conceptualize these problems as falling into two categories: fraud and inefficiency on the one hand, and inadequacy on the other.…”

Listening to snitches: Race/ethnicity, English proficiency, and access to welfare fraud enforcement systems

“…In making these determinations, fraud workers exercise the discretion that characterizes the working lives of street-level bureaucrats (Brodkin, 1997;Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003;Watkins-Hayes, 2009b). A noteworthy instrumental rationality applies to these discretionary determinations; fraud workers are outcome-driven, focused on successfully establishing as many cases as they can, especially intentional fraud cases (Headworth, 2021a). Thus, a different calculus applies here than in many contexts of individual-initiated access to the state: gatekeepers are motivated to maximize specific outcomes invoking the state's coercive power, not its supportive capacities.…”