the problem is that this is an important system (because it directs ~80% of investigations) without transparency, audits, and on top of this when these groups started to ask questions the attitude of the government was - surprise surprise - to try to deny their requests for transparency
and on top of (or beneath) all this there's the question of model performance, calibration, etc. and cost-benefit of this whole investigation department.
as in the recent case of California welfare fraud ~90% (or more) was perpetrated by organized crime groups. (which is absolutely not surprising, after all it requires a big operation to file hundreds of thousands of completely fake but seemingly-valid claims.) their claim that their model is targeting ~600 or more EUR/month frauds, which covers ~98% of the cases (based on some past historic data), but there's no mention of how much sense does this make. (it's quite likely that they could get ~90% of fraud value with drastically less effort spent on investigating those who are already likely to turn out to be rightful recipients, etc.)
so all in all there ought to be a very strong bias against the classic "looking for the keys under the streetlamp" mistake, which in this case means there's likely a real negative cost-benefit to spending most investigative resources on those who are already very likely to be rightful recipients of welfare.
(not to mention the usual completely avoidable - and thus totally infuriating and idiotic - discontinuity problems, like single parent with a kid just turned 18, or whatever the limit is, suddenly there's a huge drop in income, huge motivation to try to smudge the numbers, and somehow get more months of payments, etc.)
of course, hard data is always welcome, I'm just a regular keyboard warrior
Organized crime brings this issue to another level.
"Basic controllers" will prefer to control not dangerous people (assuming they can tell them appart), to avoid to expose themselves to obvious danger. Because dealing with organized crime requires a whole other apparatus: the justice departement with the help of "services" (ahem...). Usually, those have to deal with the real nasty: killers, human traffickers, etc. They are very limited in human work force with often not enough means to do that work: so the "could you nuke those people because they are frauding the welfare system", ahem, maybe once in a while for posture. That makes me think about the movie and music industry asking for state-grade mass-monitoring of internet for their own benefit (in my country, they got that, hence you cannot trust the gov at not resisting such unreasonable lobbying).
To try to explain the shadows around this: with fraud and organized crime, beautiful ideological ideas do not work anymore: this is the hard reality, and it is often ugly. Only one thing has to really monitored: if the reality induced bias-es are not significantly self-maintaining/increasing that reality with some sort of feedback loop, presuming it is even possible to quantify that... Everybody wishes to never be on the bad sides of those reality induced bias-es. That's for the the "good" part, the "nasty" part is when it is not reality induced bias-es anymore but transforms into something ideological.
and on top of (or beneath) all this there's the question of model performance, calibration, etc. and cost-benefit of this whole investigation department.
as in the recent case of California welfare fraud ~90% (or more) was perpetrated by organized crime groups. (which is absolutely not surprising, after all it requires a big operation to file hundreds of thousands of completely fake but seemingly-valid claims.) their claim that their model is targeting ~600 or more EUR/month frauds, which covers ~98% of the cases (based on some past historic data), but there's no mention of how much sense does this make. (it's quite likely that they could get ~90% of fraud value with drastically less effort spent on investigating those who are already likely to turn out to be rightful recipients, etc.)
so all in all there ought to be a very strong bias against the classic "looking for the keys under the streetlamp" mistake, which in this case means there's likely a real negative cost-benefit to spending most investigative resources on those who are already very likely to be rightful recipients of welfare.
(not to mention the usual completely avoidable - and thus totally infuriating and idiotic - discontinuity problems, like single parent with a kid just turned 18, or whatever the limit is, suddenly there's a huge drop in income, huge motivation to try to smudge the numbers, and somehow get more months of payments, etc.)
of course, hard data is always welcome, I'm just a regular keyboard warrior