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.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	8 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	runako 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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WalterBright 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That doesn't mean 11% of recipients are fraudulent.

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OGEnthusiast 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

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tbrownaw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Where does mass trustworthy behavior (ie, "a high trust society") come from?

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loeg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

From the perspective of 2025, it's pretty incredible how much of a higher trust society we had as recently as 2019.

	▲	Braxton1980 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		How are you measuring this?

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tstrimple 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It probably starts when one of the only two viable political parties stops undermining everything possibly good in this country in their effort to prove government doesn't work.

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selimthegrim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you have more references about this?

	▲	loeg 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a very recent story, but for example: 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-... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...

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terminalshort 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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macintux 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.