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They're neglecting the fact that if you eliminated the checks, a lot more people would apply for benefits (and you would have to deal with much more fraud - look at the COVID relief fraud which had fairly little supervision). Induced demand, if you will.

It's the same as the TSA - they're not very good at catching people bringing things through at airports, but their mere presence there acts as a pretty good deterrent for people trying funky things.

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You can't compare this to COVID loan fraud. Those are apples and oranges. COVID relief loans had requirements but the watchdog that was meant to oversee it was rendered toothless. In this situation the only chance of you fraud is someone applying as someone else and you handle that the same way you handle all identity fraud.

This is why Universal Income makes sense. There can be no cheating if everyone is eligible.

To put things in perspective, the various federal and state welfare agencies in Australia employ something like 200K bureaucrats to allocate and monitor welfare handouts.

If they were all made redundant, the money saved would add a significant amount to the available welfare budget.

I worked as a consultant at several of these agencies and I can assure you that most of the jobs there were bullshit.

One coworker described these places as “daycare for adults”.

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