Welfare fraud is the act of illegally using state welfare systems by knowingly withholding or giving information to obtain more funds than would otherwise be allocated.
This article deals with welfare fraud in various countries of the world, and includes many social benefit programs such as food assistance, housing, unemployment benefits, Social Security, disability, and medical. Each country's problems and programs are varied. Obtaining reliable evidence of welfare fraud is notoriously difficult.[1] Apart from the obvious methodological problems, research reveals that interviewing performance is often mediocre, and may be anecdotal, misunderstood, or collected from opinionated or biased caseworkers.[2] Interviews with non-citizen welfare recipients, where the interviewer has succeeded in gaining a high level of trust, have shown that a very high percent fail to report incomes.[3][4] Official figures of the prevalence of welfare fraud based on government investigation tend to be low – a few percent of the total amount of welfare spending. Statistical research indicates that the vast majority of fraud is committed by businesses serving the recipients of government benefits.[5] Welfare or benefits fraud committed by recipients is usually of very modest sums, and is committed by people who struggle with poverty; but once started it often continues after reaching financial stability.[6][7]
- ^ Mathieu Lefebvre, Pierre Pestieau, Arno Riedl, Marie Claire Villeval: Tax Evasion, Welfare Fraud, and "The Broken Windows" Effect: An Experiment in Belgium, France and the Netherlands CESifo Working Paper 3408, April 2011.
- ^ (Dave Walsh and Ray Bull: Benefit Fraud Investigative Interviewing: A Self-Report Study of Investigation Professionals' Beliefs Concerning Practice Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, vol. 8 issue 2, June 2011.)
- ^ Shiri Regev-Messalem: (2013), Claiming Citizenship: The Political Dimension of Welfare Fraud. Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 38 Issue 4 (Fall 2013).
- ^ Kaaryn S. Gustafson: Cheating Welfare: Public Assistance and the Criminalization of Poverty p. 160. NYU Press, 2012.
- ^ "Who is Really Responsible for Welfare Fraud?". April 2014.
- ^ Martin James Tunley: Need, greed or opportunity? An examination of who commits benefit fraud and why they do it Security Journal vol. 24 issue 4 (November 2010).
- ^ B. Kazemier, R. Van Eck, C.C. Koopmans: "Economische aspekten van belasting – en premie ontduiking en misbruik van sociale uitkeringen." In D.J. Hessing & H.P.A.M. Arendonk (Eds.): Sociale-Zekerheidsfraude: Juridische, ekonomische en psychologische aspecten van fraud in het sociale-zekerheidsstelsel, pp. 123-90. Dewenter 1990, Kluwer. Cited in D.J. Hessing, H. Elffers, H.S.J. Robben, P. Webley: Needy or greedy? The social psychology of individuals who fraudulently claim unemployment benefits Journal of Applied Social Psychology vol. 23, issue 3 (1993).