One political narrative is the tale of the poor defrauding government programs. The (alleged) grifter Donald Trump, for example, claims that the poor commit a lot of fraud.  Fox News consistently claims, usually without evidence, that government programs aimed to help the poor are exploited by the poor. In most cases, the “evidence” presented in support of such claims seems to be that they feel that there must be a lot of fraud. However, there is little inclination to look for supporting evidence—if they feel strongly enough that a claim is true, that is good enough for them.

The claim that such aid is fraught  with fraud is often used to argue that it should be cut or even eliminated.  The idea is that the poor are “takers” who are fraudulently living off the “makers.” While fraud is wrong, it is important to consider some key questions.

The first question is this: what is the actual percentage of fraud that occurs in such programs? While, as noted above, some claim fraud is rampant, the statistical data tells another story.  In the case of unemployment insurance, the rate of fraud is estimated to be less than 2%. This is lower than the rate of fraud in the private sector. In the case of welfare, fraud is sometimes reported at being 20%-40% at the state level. However, the “fraud” seems to mostly errors by bureaucrats rather than fraud committed by the recipients. Naturally, an error rate so high is unacceptable—but is a different narrative than that of the wicked poor stealing from the taxpayers.

SNAP (Food stamp) fraud does occur—but it is mostly committed by businesses rather than the recipients.  While there is some fraud on the part of recipients, the best data indicates that such fraud accounts for about 1% of the payments. Given the rate of fraud in the private sector, that is exceptionally good.

Given this data, the overwhelming majority of those who receive assistance are not engaged in fraud. This is not to say that fraud should be ignored—in fact, it is the concern with fraud on the part of the recipients that has resulted in such low incidents of fraud. Interestingly, about one third of fraud involving government money involves not the poor, but defense contractors who account for about $100 billion in fraud per year. Medicare and Medicaid combined have about $100 billion in fraudulent expenditures per year. While there is also a narrative of the wicked poor in regards to Medicare and Medicaid, the fraud is usually perpetrated by the providers of health care rather than the recipients. As such, the focus on fraud should shift from the poor recipients of aid to defense contractors and to address Medicare/Medicaid issues. That is, it is not the wicked poor who are siphoning away money with fraud, it is the wicked wealthy who are stealing from the rest of us. As such the narrative of the poor defrauding the state is a flawed narrative. While it does happen, the overall level of fraud on the part of recipients seems to be less than 2%. Most of the fraud, contrary to the narrative, is committed by those who are not poor. While the existence of fraud does show a need to address that fraud, the narrative has cast the wrong people as villains.

While the idea of mass welfare cheating is unfounded, a good faith debate can be had as to whether people should receive support from the state. After all, even if most recipients are honestly following the rules and not engaged in fraud, there is still the question of whether the state should be providing welfare, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and similar such benefits. Of course, the narrative against helping citizens in need does lose much of its rhetorical power if you know the poor are not fraudsters. That dishonor goes to a wealthier class of people, which should be no surprise. After all, if the poor were engaged in the level of fraud attributed to them, they would no longer be poor.