Anyway, a lot of conservative groups tend to conflate error rates and fraud, and extrapolate sometimes wild estimates of welfare fraud on that basis. But there is fraud on welfare programs at differing rates for different programs.
For example:
“…
For every 10,000 households participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), about 14 contained a recipient who was investigated and determined to have committed fraud (via a
2018 report by the Congressional Research Service). Within SNAP, for every $10,000 paid in benefits, about $11 is determined by state agencies to have been overpaid due to recipient fraud.
To put this into perspective, the IRS estimates that for every $6 owed in federal taxes, $1 is not paid because of tax evasion or fraud. …”
Learn more about the origins of and the mythology around the idea of the "Welfare Queen," and watch Storming Caesars Palace on PBS.
www.pbs.org
Dated but still useful as it appears to track the same cross-arguments and stats about welfare fraud as we see now:
Entitlement programs, from food stamps to Medicare, don't see unusually high cheating rates -- and the culprits are usually managers and executives, not "welfare queens."
www.theatlantic.com
“…According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the typical business loses 5 percent of its revenue to fraud each year. Even when detected, 40 to 50 percent of victimized companies don’t recover their losses. The industries
most likely to be victims of fraud are the banking and financial sector; government and public administration; and manufacturing.
… It’s not easy to get agreement on actual fraud levels in government programs. Unsurprisingly, liberals say they’re low, while conservatives insist they’re astronomically high.
In truth, it varies from program to program.
One government report says fraud accounts for less than 2 percent of unemployment insurance payments. It’s seemingly impossible to find statistics on “welfare” (i.e.,
TANF) fraud, but the best guess is that it’s about the same.
A
bevy of inspector general reports found “improper payment” levels of 20 to 40 percent in state TANF programs -- but when you look at the reports, the payments appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence (
categorized by the inspector general as either “eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors”), rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries.
A similar story emerges with everyone’s favorite punching bag, food stamps (or, as they’re known today, SNAP). Earlier this year, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, both Republicans,
introduced legislation to save $30 billion over 10 years from SNAP, purportedly by “eliminating loopholes, waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Once you dig into
their fact sheet, however, none of the savings actually come from fraud, but rather from cutting funding and tightening benefits. That’s probably because fraud levels in SNAP appear to be as low as with the other “pure welfare” programs we just touched on: “Payment error” rates -- money sent in incorrect amounts and/or to the wrong people -- have
declined from near 10 percent a decade ago to 3 to 4 percent today, most of it due, again, to government error, not active fraud.
The majority of food-stamp fraud appears to be generated by supermarkets
“trafficking” in the food stamps. Beneficiaries intentionally ripping off the taxpayers account for
perhaps 1 percent of payments.
… No one knows for sure how much Medicaid and Medicare fraud there is. According to the FBI, the cost for Medicare fraud is anywhere from 3 to 10 percent, while Attorney General Eric Holder estimates $60 to $90 billion in fraud in Medicare and almost the same amount in Medicaid fraud -- approaching 20 percent. While nowhere near as large as Medicare and Medicaid, the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs are each estimated to be paying about 10 percent of their expenditures in fraudulent claims.
To round out the picture, you can toss in defense contractor fraud --
perhaps as much as another $100 billion per year, roughly in the same range as Medicare and Medicaid combined. All told, fraud in federal programs may come to $300 billion a year or about 10 percent of the budget (as with financial services). …”
