Comment by amiga386

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.