I have serious reservation about the system, but the key ones are: - It’s wrongly presented as a tool against fraud: it’s a tool to identify complex cases that

I have serious reservation about the system, but the key ones are: - It’s wrongly presented as a tool against fraud: it’s a tool to identify complex cases that are more likely to need human review. It is presented as unfair because files with mistakes can lead to asking people to pay back the money they have received in error, but it’s a big moral step to see that as the state abusing its power. - There’s no attempt to match that risk to the actual complexity of cases and decide if the model is fair. It feels unprofessional not to connect the model with observations and bias: a model where the Police makes arrest perpetuates bias because it doesn’t take crimes without arrests in un-patrolled neighborhoods. If that were the case, the article would focus on the weight in training of a sample audited at random, or about the value of families suspected to be confused that were not (less than zero). The argument “they are targeting confused people in need of help rather than big fraud cases” doesn’t make much sense: those are never very large sums. Significant fraud cases would have to be spread around many recipients told how to abuse the system, and from whom fraudsters collect. It is fair to make that point against large tax frauds, but 1. That's a different administration and 2. You don’t want a model estimating if the recipient is confused. Fraudsters are not confused; they know exactly what they are doing and why.