Comment by wredcoll
20 days ago
My ultimate take on the article is "so what?"
Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article.
I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't.
If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower standard of evidence before taking action.
Is there something I'm missing?
My take-away from the article is a bunch of fraud-identifying and fraud-thwarting tips.
Ideally, state programs should:
1. not pay out until a beneficiary's bona-fides are first verified. Paying out first, with no verification, and only retrospectively trying to claw back fraudulent claims, only after expensive investigations, is ruinous on the state budget.
2. work with private industry to identify alleged fraudsters
3. require much more verification of alleged fraudsters before agreeing to pay anything out
4. snoop around to find fraudsters' abettors because they're easier to find than the fraudsters
Other than one section saying that fraud investigators should expect to find ethnic clusters (because fraudsters of all ethnicities use their families and friends), there's nothing about ethnicity being a "flag". The biggest flag is that the same person previously committed fraud, and the article laments that civic government often gives a "clean sheet" to known fraudsters, in a way that the finance industry never would.
There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.
The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.
A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.
But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.
> If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity
This is not a fair or reasonable conclusion from what the article actually says.
That's what I'm getting from this article too. It's giving "Nick Shirley in the style of lots of extra words".