4 ms·

Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start,

by macintux 11mo ago

Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent, therefore the other 99% must spend 10 hours on paperwork and 6 months waiting for the benefits to start, with a 30% chance of rejection" approach.

terminalshort 11mo ago
Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?
- macintux 11mo ago
  I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits. With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
  - zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
    There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work. Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
    - Braxton1980 11mo ago
      That $200billion means about 17% fraud in a program with minimal checks
  - coryrc 11mo ago
    Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?
Aurornis 11mo ago
> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem. The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate. When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.
- runako 11mo ago
  There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits). Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all). Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    > Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. That’s not how fraud is defined. The fraud rates are calculated from doing in-depth audits of a sampling of applicants. It’s not the rate of rejections. That’s an assumption you embedded and tried to project on to others.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
OGEnthusiast 11mo ago
Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).
- selimthegrim 11mo ago
  Do you have more references about this?
  - loeg 11mo ago
    It's a very recent story, but for example: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-autism-fraud-scheme-0 https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a... The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate: https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-in-16-somali-children-diagnosed-with-autism-three-times-more-than-state https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-rise-in-autism-diagnoses-among-somali-american-children https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
    - selimthegrim 11mo ago
      Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
      - coryrc 11mo ago
        You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news. "Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."
WalterBright 11mo ago
> 1% of the recipients are fraudulent Google sez: "The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."
- insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  That doesn't mean 11% of recipients are fraudulent.
- Aloisius 11mo ago
  Em. "Improper payments" includes mistaken payments, overpayments and underpayments. It is a measure of payment (or non-payment) errors, not fraud.

terminalshort 11mo ago

Have you considered that the reason it's only 1% is because they are strict and have a high rejection rate?

macintux 11mo ago
I would rather suffer 5-10% fraud if 100% of the eligible recipients are able to receive the benefits. With the current system, far fewer than 100% of the people intended to benefit will actually make the cut.
- zeroonetwothree 11mo ago
  There’s no reason to assume it would be as low as 10% without strict checks. It could easily be 90% or more. We already see big regional difference for tax and medical fraud which likely reflects different enforcement levels and knowledge about how to skirt them.
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  But you're not going to get 5-10% fraud. Already there is significant disability fraud way past your 1% number even in our strict system. e.g. there are counties in the US where almost 1 in 5 working age adults is on disability because they are supposedly too disabled to work. Most people won't commit fraud in an honest system, but that flips rapidly when they see fraud being tolerated. You make it easy to defraud the program and the fraudsters will pile in. Your staff will be overwhelmed and 90% of the applications will be fraudulent. Just look at what happened with the PPP program during covid. It's estimated that $200 billion was lost to fraud.
  - Braxton1980 11mo ago
    That $200billion means about 17% fraud in a program with minimal checks
- coryrc 11mo ago
  Washington state employment department lost $645 million in a matter of weeks in spring 2025 when they reduced fraud detection. Normally they spend $2-3 billion a year. Making some wild projections, that's 77% fraud rate?

Aurornis 11mo ago

> Don't forget the "1% of the recipients are fraudulent It’s complicated. Having 1% fraudulent recipients despite having very thorough and deep vetting processes should be a clue that fraud is a big problem. The fallacy is assuming that the fraud rate would stay the same if we removed the checks. It would not. The 1% fraud rate is only what gets through the current checks. The more you remove the checks, the higher the fraud rate. When systems remove all fraud checks, the amount of fraud is hard to fathom if you’ve never been on the side of a fraud detection effort.

runako 11mo ago
There's a couple of fallacies embedded here. For example, that there is a thorough and deep vetting process that is also impartial (vs being invested in denying benefits). Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. Programs are incredibly complex, and requirements are a moving target. I can imagine someone going to renew based on their understanding of the program, and inadvertently being flagged as fraud because some requirement changed (which in turn might have been incorrectly conveyed because the requirements are complex and even state staffers may not understand them all). Some of this is down to the DOGE definition of "fraud, waste, abuse" as "anything we do not like." Using that definition, you can find fraud anywhere.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > Also the assumption that an application that is denied == fraud. That’s not how fraud is defined. The fraud rates are calculated from doing in-depth audits of a sampling of applicants. It’s not the rate of rejections. That’s an assumption you embedded and tried to project on to others.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

OGEnthusiast 11mo ago

Unfortunately the US doesn't have a high-trust society anymore, so paperwork is a necessary evil to prevent malicious foreign actors from wiping us clean. (See: the recent Somalian autism claims scams in Minnesota).

selimthegrim 11mo ago
Do you have more references about this?
- loeg 11mo ago
  It's a very recent story, but for example: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-autism-fraud-scheme-0 https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a... The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate: https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-in-16-somali-children-diagnosed-with-autism-three-times-more-than-state https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-rise-in-autism-diagnoses-among-somali-american-children https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
  - selimthegrim 11mo ago
    Interesting, my understanding was that the Somali parents were mad that their children’s autism, which wasn’t presenting the same way as the kind of standard Rain Man type of autism wasn’t being characterized correctly.
    - coryrc 11mo ago
      You were very wrong. Might want to consider where you get your news. "Often, parents threatened to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks. Several larger families left Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other autism centers."

WalterBright 11mo ago

> 1% of the recipients are fraudulent Google sez: "The total amount of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) improper payments for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was an estimated $10.5 billion, or 11.7% of total benefits paid."

insane_dreamer 11mo ago
That doesn't mean 11% of recipients are fraudulent.
Aloisius 11mo ago
Em. "Improper payments" includes mistaken payments, overpayments and underpayments. It is a measure of payment (or non-payment) errors, not fraud.