Article

Punishment & Society

2021, Vol. 23(1) 24–46
Broke people, broken ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520928131
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attributions

Spencer Headworth
Purdue University, USA

Abstract
There is a notable contrast between welfare clients’ and welfare fraud investigators’
accounts of rule breaking behaviors. Clients describe some actions (or inactions) that
constitute rule violations as accidental, and tend to attribute others to situational factors:
program rules’ complexity, the exigencies of day-to-day subsistence, and time and energy
limitations. Fraud investigators, on the other hand, are comparatively likely to identify rule
breaking as deliberate and cite clients’ dispositions to explain the behavior. In part, this
disparity reflects the “fundamental attribution error,” the tendency to overestimate dis-
positional factors’ role in driving others’ behavior. However, evidence from interviews with
welfare fraud workers from five US states reveals the impactful administrative and nor-
mative factors that encourage them to make and assert attributions of intentionality and
dispositional motivation. First, administrative priorities foreground intentional violations:
federal authorities financially incentivize deliberate fraud charges, and managers favor
these cases, which permit client suspensions and disqualifications. Second, emphasizing
internal motivations over situational pressures serves a valuable normative function, estab-
lishing punished clients’ blameworthiness and thus defending the legitimacy of both indi-
vidual fraud workers and the units they compose. These findings demonstrate how policy
structures and enforcement practices do not just respond to blameworthy or legally
culpable behavior, but help construct narratives of blameworthiness and culpability.

Keywords
attribution, fraud, intent, welfare

Corresponding author:
Spencer Headworth, Purdue University, 700 W. State St., Room 347, West Lafayette 47907-2050, IN, USA.
Email: sheadworth@purdue.edu
Headworth 25

Welfare’s history is substantially a history of exclusion. In the United States, pol-

icies restricting assistance to the “truly deserving” have entailed partial or total
exclusion for people held outside of that category, especially people of color (Fox,
2012; Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001). Stated motivations for these restrictions typ-
ically emphasize withholding aid from able-bodied people of working age, reason-
ing that such people should be held individually responsible for improving their
own lots in life (Katz 2013[1989]). This version of a social safety net entails sig-
nificant administrative tasks of specifying the parameters of eligibility categories
and delineating between people who are in and out of those categories. Beyond
these category construction and sorting tasks, this approach also creates pressure
to police boundaries between the ineligible and the eligible to ensure that people
have been accurately categorized and reduce illegitimate interlopers’ presence
among clients. Identifying legitimate aid claimants—and excluding illegitimate
claimants—are core processes of US public assistance programs. These exclusion
processes pertain particularly to stigmatized means-tested “welfare” programs,
rather than more positively regarded “entitlement” programs for other groups
deemed more deserving of assistance, such as older people and people with dis-
abilities (see Gordon, 1994).
US welfare administration agencies maintain dedicated fraud control units
charged with detecting, investigating, and substantiating clients’ rule violations.
These units help bureaucracies identify and exclude illegitimate participants.
Their rationale invokes the idea of widespread deliberate, malicious program
abuses, reflecting racialized and gendered stigma against the poor and means-
tested public assistance participants (Gans, 1995; Gilens, 1999; Hancock, 2004;
Katz 1996[1986]). Fraud investigations focus particularly on clients’ disqualifying
actions: purposeful acts of misrepresentation to gain eligibility or increase benefit
allotments, or misusing benefit resources (for instance, engaging in Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) trafficking by exchanging SNAP benefits
for cash or goods). Establishing deliberate rule breaking allows welfare agencies to
go beyond detecting overpayments and adjusting benefit amounts; Intentional
Program Violations (IPVs) carry exclusionary consequences, via temporary
client suspensions and permanent disqualifications. Fraud control units also
refer some deliberate fraud allegations to prosecutors’ offices for criminal charges.
These dedicated fraud investigation units demonstrate punitive adversarialism
within the US welfare system. Punitive adversarialism refers to the institutionali-
zation of surveillance, investigation, formal charging processes, and punishments
within bureaucratic structure. The word “adversarial” does double duty in the
term. First, it denotes the word’s jurisprudential meaning, referring to a legal
system that uses oppositional contests between parties to adjudicate disputes
and assess legal liabilities (Kagan, 2001).1 US welfare programs are generally
adversarial in this sense, and “tend to rely on detailed rules and rights, enforceable
in court” (Kagan, 2001:159). This tendency offers some rights-claiming opportu-
nities, but also pressures officials to pursue comprehensive client oversight and
enforce punctilious rule adherence. Dedicated fraud control units constitute
26 Punishment & Society 23(1)

specialized instruments for advancing these goals. They bring administrative

charges against clients that are adjudicated in oppositional Administrative
Disqualification Hearings, and also provide evidence to prosecutors to support
criminal charges connected to program rule violations.
The “punitive” qualifier connotes that “adversarial” also carries its colloquial
meaning in the concept of punitive adversarialism. That is, punitive adversarialism
entails animosity and conflict. Beyond their designated bureaucratic function as
tools for launching and substantiating formal rule violation charges, fraud units
serve to entrench an antagonistic, punishment-oriented stance toward program
applicants and clients. Although friction and enmity may characterize other adver-
sarial legal processes (see Porter et al., 2019), punitive adversarialism describes
structures and practices that inherently impart antagonism to the relationship
between bureaucracy and individuals.
Under punitive adversarialism, organizational structures and norms function-
ally treat administrative problems as crime problems and deviance within bureau-
cratic systems as crime or crime-adjacent. Punitive adversarialism within welfare
bureaucracies tracks with the increased punitiveness of the criminal legal system in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (see Hinton, 2016; Kohler-
Hausmann 2017; Wacquant, 2009). Like these changes in conventional policing,
prosecution, and sentencing, legal and administrative interventions that position
agencies and clients antagonistically create circumstances conducive to de jure and
de facto criminalization of individuals, groups, and statuses, such as poverty.
This article addresses an outgrowth of punitive adversarialism in the welfare
system: the notable discrepancy between how welfare clients depict rule-breaking
behavior and how fraud investigators depict such behavior. Previous studies
focused on clients note that, from clients’ perspective, rule violations are often
accidental or products of situational desperation (Edin and Lein, 1997; Gilliom,
2001; Gustafson, 2011). However, based on my interviews with fraud investigators,
I find that they depict things differently, describing clients’ rule violations as over-
whelmingly intentional and dispositionally motivated. To explain this divergence,
I offer a two-part answer. First, at the general psychological level, I note that
the fundamental attribution error (FAE)—the tendency to attribute others’ behav-
ior to dispositional influences rather than environmental factors (Ross, 1977:
183–184)—is likely at play in investigators’ comparative emphasis on intentionality
and dispositional motivation. Beyond this basic psychological tendency, however,
fraud workers’ interview responses reveal the administrative priorities and norma-
tive considerations that engender emphasizing intentionality and dispositional
causes relative to situational factors. Organizational imperatives encourage inves-
tigators to see and substantiate rule violations as deliberate, which is crucial to
program retrenchment via fraud control interventions because this designation
allows agencies to suspend and disqualify clients. Further, depicting rule violations
as volitional and malicious serves the normative functions of justifying rule-break-
ers’ punishments and legitimizing fraud enforcement activities.
Headworth 27

Altogether, these findings show how formal social control activity does not
simply respond to blameworthy or problematic behavior. Like police and prose-
cutors, welfare fraud investigators need to define actions as intentional to support
legal punishments, and they benefit from presenting enforcement practices and
sanctions as appropriate and deserved. Thus, organizational and personal imper-
atives do more than motivate enforcement agents to seek out instances of legally
proscribed behavior; they also motivate enforcement agents to capaciously identify
the behaviors they encounter as meeting the standards of proscription. And, as I go
on to explain, fraud workers’ attributions of purposeful, malicious behavior to
clients invoke invidious stereotypes about the undeserving poor, suggesting that
many fraud perpetrators are not truly struggling and that fraud results more from
greed than from need.

Background
Suspicion and investigation in public assistance
Concerns about recipients’ deliberate misrepresentation and abuse are roughly as
old as organized poverty relief efforts themselves. As early as the 14th century, the
English Poor Law connected deception and fraud with poverty and vagrancy
(Stone, 1984:35).2 In the United States, longstanding white majority concerns
about ineligible or “unworthy” individuals and families receiving public assistance
magnified and intersected with racial animus in the wake of post-WWII black
urban migration. In response, local authorities in large metropolitan areas and
some smaller municipalities launched investigations into “chiseling” and fraud in
the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (Kohler-Hausmann 2015; Levin, 2019:40–41). Further
interventions during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries aimed at
aggressively policing rule violations, and more generally pulling back social safety
net provision for people deemed undeserving. Corresponding rhetoric combined
ideas of sloth and dependence among the poor with claims that many (or most)
welfare clients were greedy, malicious chiselers intent on defrauding the system and
parasitizing the social body. Anti-fraud initiatives routinely frame program cli-
ents—especially black clients—as “welfare queens,” deceptive criminals who are
essentially financially comfortable (Kohler-Hausmann, 2007).
For this study’s purposes, the Food Security Act of 1985 is a crucial example of
such interventions. Among multiple provisions, this statute required state govern-
ments to maintain fraud control units within their SNAP administration agencies
(P.L. 99–198, § 1526). These designated fraud enforcement entities are responsible
for detecting, investigating, and substantiating clients’ alleged rule violations,
including ineligible people receiving aid and clients using public assistance resour-
ces for non-sanctioned purposes. In this role, they use investigation and penaliza-
tion to advance the program administration goals of ensuring that means-tested
public assistance resources flow only to the legitimately eligible and are applied
only to legitimate ends.3
28 Punishment & Society 23(1)

Although generally administrative employees of public assistance agencies, wel-

fare fraud investigators’ investigative and punitive role aligns more closely with the
conventions of policing and prosecution than those of social work. The violations
that they attempt to substantiate are primarily administrative, and therefore sub-
ject to administrative rather than criminal penalties. These penalties, however,
frequently include program suspension or disqualification, and can be exceedingly
serious for people living on the socioeconomic margins. And these administrative
cases sometimes lead to criminal charges. Fraud control units are thus a leading
example of the expanded class of non-criminal justice state agencies who exert
formal social control, both through applying their own non-criminal sanctions
and through acting as “feeder” organizations for the conventional criminal justice
system, contributing to the commingling of criminal justice and poverty manage-
ment (Garland, 1985; Wacquant, 2009).
Surveillance and punishment suffuse welfare’s history (Garland, 1985; Piven
and Cloward1993[1971]). Dedicated fraud control units represent these character-
istics’ formalization within welfare bureaucracies. As such, they exemplify the
carceral state’s “institutional annexation of sites and actors beyond what is legally
recognized as part of the criminal justice system” (Beckett and Murakawa, 2012:
222). Through formally entrenching mechanisms for client investigation and pun-
ishment in social service agencies, fraud units demonstrate the inverse of criminal
justice systems’ importation of welfare logics (Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto,
2012; Stuart, 2016). Welfare fraud investigators’ dedicated enforcement role
spans functions associated with conventional police and functions associated
with criminal prosecutors. In detecting violations and gathering evidence, they
act analogously to police. In presenting evidence to substantiate fraud charges in
Administrative Disqualification Hearings, they act analogously to prosecutors.
They also act analogously to police or prosecutorial investigators when providing
evidence to prosecutors’ offices to support criminal cases.
Bridges (2017: 87) notes that both welfare programs and the criminal law fun-
damentally manage poor people, and that both “are motivated by the same theory
of human behavior . . . view[ing] personal shortcomings as explanations for how the
populations that they regulate arrive within their jurisdictions.” Designating spe-
cialized enforcement agents within welfare bureaucracies reflects this theory of
human behavior’s influence, and facilitates investigatory and punitive responses
in welfare that parallel those of the criminal legal system. Clients, on the other
hand, often present accountings of rule-violating behavior that diverge from the
mens rea required for many criminal convictions.

Clients’ perspectives on rules and rule violations

Because my original data derive from interviews with investigators, I rely on pre-
vious studies for clients’ perceptions of rule-violating behaviors. In such studies,
many clients admit violating program rules through behaviors such as earning
unreported income or selling SNAP benefits. Facing significant gaps between
Headworth 29

available resources and basic household expenses, many poor people who partic-
ipate in public assistance programs feel that they have no choice but to “work” the
system using strategies like selling food stamps, earning unreported income, or
covertly receiving assistance from people in their lives (Edin and Lein, 1997: 41–
45; Edin and Shaefer, 2015:Ch. 4; Gilliom, 2001: 6). Such rule violations are inten-
tional, in the most basic sense; people are aware that these strategies constitute rule
violations, fear detection and punishment, and prefer approaches that they believe
to be less vulnerable to welfare authorities’ detection (Edin and Lein, 1997: 144–
145; Gilliom, 2001:88; Gustafson, 2011:154). Yet, unable to meet their households’
financial needs through strictly “by the book” program participation, clients feel
impelled to bend or break rules. Thus, when clients acknowledge rule-violating
behaviors, they tend to attribute these behaviors to situational constraints and
exigencies, not internal dispositions. Indeed, clients—even clients who admit
breaking rules themselves—denounce rule violations arising from greed or sloth,
rather than situations of need (Gustafson, 2011:151–152).
From clients’ perspective, other rule violations are unintended or unwitting
altogether. Program rules are complex. Clients experience information overload
and encounter bureaucratic impediments to information access (Gustafson,
2011:110–112; Levine, 2013:Ch. 2; see also Herd and Moynihan, 2018).
Accordingly, most clients have limited and flawed knowledge of the specific con-
ditions that pertain to program participation and their information reporting obli-
gations (Gustafson, 2011: 129), and even the best informed have significant gaps in
program knowledge (Gustafson, 2011: 124). Poor people’s lives are typically pre-
carious and unstable; ensuring total compliance with program stipulations and
requirements may not be a top priority, and can get lost in the shuffle (Edin and
Lein, 1997; Edin and Shaefer, 2015). This is especially true for the most severely
marginalized clients, whose day-to-day struggles for survival impede meaningful
engagement with bureaucratic systems (Gustafson, 2011:139).

The social psychology of attributions

There are basic social psychological reasons to expect that clients would predom-
inantly cite accidents and situational factors to explain rule-violating behaviors.
Negative actions attributed to volition tend to garner more social disapprobation
and greater penalties than negative actions attributed to mistakes or external
causes (Hawkins, 1981; Jellison and Green, 1981: 644). Thus, denials of intention-
ality and situational attributions may help clients avoid blame and save face
(Goffman, 1959, 1967; Sabini et al., 2001).
Similarly, social psychological research offers a foundation for expecting that
outside observers will tend to overestimate dispositional factors’ impact relative to
environmental influences’ in explaining others’ behaviors; Ross (1977:183–184)
dubs this tendency the “fundamental attribution error.” As Jellison and Green
(1981: 648) summarize, “attributing the behavior of others to internal factors is
advantageous to actors because it allows them to block others’ attempts to escape
30 Punishment & Society 23(1)

from responsibility and allows them to justify punishments and retribution. When
explaining one’s own behavior, the most prudent strategy is typically to defend
against punishment by claiming external causes unless the action is clearly socially
desirable” (see also Bradley, 1978). Such proclivities may be particularly likely in
formal social control contexts such as welfare fraud enforcement. Here, enforce-
ment agents and targets are adversarially positioned and intent and personal
responsibility are salient legal considerations (Maselli and Altrocchi, 1969); deny-
ing intentionality and foregrounding situational factors may help clients mitigate
legal liability, and ascribing intentionality and foregrounding dispositional factors
may help investigators substantiate charges.
As these circumstances would suggest, fraud workers are indeed more prone
than clients to attribute rule-violating behavior to volitional internal states. Fraud
investigators’ accounts of their work and depictions of the clients they investigate,
however, indicate factors beyond basic social psychological biases at play in pro-
ducing this difference. My interviews with fraud workers show how administrative
priorities engender conceptualizations of rule violations as intentional rather than
accidental; the organizational and individual incentives attached to investigators’
bureaucratic role encourage them to interpret rule violations as purposeful.
The interview data also show how normative pressures engender depictions of
rule violations as products of undesirable traits or corrupt motives, rather than
situational exigencies; such attributions help justify fraud investigation and pun-
ishment. Together, these pressures constitute a situational explanation for fraud
investigators’ dispositional attributions.

Data and methods

I began this research with a descriptive national overview of dedicated fraud control
units. This comprised assembly and review of publicly available materials about each
of the fifty US states’ and Washington, DC’s fraud control systems followed by phone
and email solicitation of additional unpublished materials and further information
from fraud unit representatives. The national overview process produced baseline
information about the national picture of fraud control policies and practices.
Based on these initial results, I selected five case study states, to which I travelled
to conduct in-person interviews with fraud unit representatives and gather some
additional documentary evidence. I anonymize these five sites with identifiers denot-
ing their regional locations: “Eastcoast,” “Midatlantic,” “Northeast,” “Southeast,”
and “Southwest.” Although there are important between-state differences in fraud
control, in this article I focus on common depictions of clients and fraud broadly
shared across different jurisdictions’ fraud workers; indeed, these depictions’ com-
monality across states suggests that dedicated fraud control’s characteristic priori-
ties and pressures substantially transcend differences in politics and policies.
The data collection did not pursue the goal of representativeness that motivates
the sampling logic best-suited for descriptive questions about populations. I col-
lected interview data for the purposes of logical inference, not statistical inference,
Headworth 31

and saturation rather than representation (see Small, 2009; Yin, 2014). Sampling
for range (Small, 2009; Weiss, 1994), I selected case study states to provide vari-
ation on three variables with theoretical bearing on fraud control practice: dom-
inant political party (Democrat vs. Republican), public benefit system size, and
criminal justice punitiveness, operationalized as incarceration rate.4 The descrip-
tive overview’s results, along with interviewees’ accounts of other jurisdictions’
practices, confirm that the case study states broadly capture the national range
of variation in the size, scope, and style of fraud enforcement.
I conducted in-depth interviews with 42 fraud workers across the five states.
Participants per state ranged from a high of 15 in Eastcoast to a low of four in
Midatlantic. The interviewees include a range of those involved in fraud control
efforts, including investigators, analysts, supervisors, and managers, as well as a
handful of administrators with broader responsibilities; all names used here are
pseudonyms. I recruited voluntary participants via a recruitment message shared
by organizational gatekeepers in each state. The interviews ranged from 45 minutes
to 2.5 hours, and occurred in private areas (usually closed-door offices or meeting
rooms) within public assistance agency buildings. Each semi-structured interview
covered a range of topics related to the substance and significance of fraud control
work.5 To build rapport and encourage expansive responses, I allowed topics to
flow naturally with the course of conversation. I probed interviewees’ perspectives
on clients and fraud behavior with questions about what share of rule violations
they saw as intentional; about whether they thought people who committed fraud
were “really struggling” or “comfortable”; and about situational and dispositional
factors’ relative contributions to fraud behavior.
I began my data analysis by reading through the interview transcripts and
applying broad index codes to identify major thematic currents (Deterding and
Waters, 2018; MacQueen et al., 1998; Mason, 2002). Drawing preliminarily on
my review of relevant theory and prior empirical studies, I used these codes to
create topical subdivisions on different subjects within the corpus of interview
data, which I then revisited for multiple rounds of narrower analytic coding.
Previous research informed my initial analytic coding of themes and concepts,
and emergent findings guided further concept identification and specification
(Becker, 1998:Ch. 4).
The interviewees’ responses constitute condensed, retrospective constructions of
the subject and nature of their work (see Jerolmack and Khan, 2014). This feature
of interview data fits this article’s goals. Interview responses involving fraud work-
ers’ generalizations about their work and experiences with clients are well suited to
understanding how fraud workers generalize and collectively categorize fraud and
its perpetrators. Interviews’ “schematic” information, which “convey[s] the frame-
works through which [interviewees] view the world” (Pugh, 2013: 50), communi-
cates the institutionalized ideas that fraud workers embrace and employ in their
work. Thus, fraud workers’ interview accounts do not just reflect their general
perceptions of what they see and do in their jobs; these statements also reveal
32 Punishment & Society 23(1)

the sets of ideas that inform their ongoing careers of social action (see Winchester
and Green, 2019).
Interviews can also provide information about what interviewees see as honor-
able, as interviewees are often prone to present themselves and their behaviors
favorably (Pugh, 2013). This tendency manifests in my data in fraud workers’
foregrounding of intentionality and greed in their explanations of fraud behavior,
positioning fraud investigators and clients on opposite sides of a morality play.
Because fraud workers’ bureaucratic position impels them to engage in aggressive
oversight and support harsh punishment for rule violators, it also encourages
conceptualizing and presenting such interventions as honorable; such depictions
support favorable perceptions of fraud control work, and are also conducive to
protecting individual self-image and self-esteem.

Fraud investigators’ attributions

Administrative priorities and attributions of intentionality
As in criminal prosecutions, the state holds the burden of proof when attempting
to establish Intentional Program Violations (IPVs). The standard of proof here,
however, is lower than the criminal system’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” stan-
dard, instead requiring the “clear and convincing” evidence common to civil cases.
Depending on the case and the charge(s), investigators may present different forms
of evidence in Administrative Disqualification Hearings (ADHs), including records
from government agencies such as departments of labor or motor vehicles; state-
ments from employers or informants; or other observational or documentary evi-
dence obtained via investigation. The hearing officers who conduct ADHs are
responsible for determining if this evidence constitutes clear and convincing
proof of the alleged violation(s).
Although client-focused research concludes that clients’ rule knowledge is lim-
ited, qualifying the intentionality of many rule-violating behaviors (Gustafson,
2011), investigators depict purposeful rule breaking as the norm and truly acci-
dental violations as rare.6 Southwest investigator Sue, for instance, estimated that
“maybe 10%”—a “charitable 10%”—of cases she sees reflect clients making gen-
uine mistakes. Investigators’ approach is generally inhospitable to the idea of rule
violations resulting from innocent errors. For the most part, they see intent very
much like the digital and physical paperwork they often use to establish it: in black
and white. Barring mitigating circumstances, documentary or observational evi-
dence contradicting a signed attestation of circumstances or demonstrating a dif-
ferent rule violation is formally probative of intentionality. Clients are expected to
understand—and obey—program stipulations such as prohibitions on earning
unreported income and selling SNAP benefits. Application processes include con-
sent and affirmation stages notifying clients of their responsibilities to disclose
information and obey program rules (see Figure 1). Applicants’ mandatory
Headworth 33

Figure 1. Sample consent and affirmation stage.

assent to these conditions provides a basis for constructing any subsequent viola-
tions as conscious and deliberate.
Fraud workers’ dominant orientation corresponds to their units’ structural
position. Finding deliberate rule breaking is their mandate, and incentives encour-
age establishing such cases. Fraud units across the country share substantiating
intentional fraud charges as a central goal. Fundamentally, these are the violations
that permit client suspensions and disqualifications; violations of program rules
that are not substantiated as intentional permit restitution orders, but not the
punitive and incapacitative penalties of temporary or permanent ineligibility.
There is some variation across different states and programs, but the typical inten-
tional fraud penalty structure follows a “three strikes and you’re out” model,
applying a one-year suspension for a first offense, a two-year suspension for a
second offense, and permanent program disqualification for a third offense.
Federal authorities also financially incentivize charges against clients, allowing
states to keep 35% of federal SNAP dollars recovered through intentional
fraud charges, and 25% of overpayments not substantiated as resulting from
deliberate fraud (Unintentional Program Violations, or UPVs). These incentives
demonstrate the orchestration of day-to-day agency activity to advance retrench-
ment goals. The common denominator for both incentives is scrutinizing clients
and identifying errors of spending. Southeast manager Jack suggests how these
incentives affect his priorities and decisions regarding allocations of investigative
time and resources:

We keep thirty-five percent for IPV [Intentional Program Violations], twenty percent
for [unintentional] cases. And if there’s an agency error that caused a loss we don’t keep
anything [chuckles]. We don’t get anything for that. [Jack adopts a playfully conspir-
atorial tone, speaking in a stage whisper and looking over the top of his reading glasses:]
‘Cause we’d be making money, you know.

Jack’s comments show how incentive structures function to emphasize some pro-
gram integrity activities over others: namely, interventions designed to identify
clients subject to suspension or disqualification for intentional fraud. He implies
that if there were more of a push to turn program integrity efforts inwards, plenty
34 Punishment & Society 23(1)

of waste and overspending could be found; that is how they would be “making
money” if they kept overpayments that resulted from agency errors. However,
monetary incentives—along with their interest in suspensions, disqualifications,
and criminal prosecutions—encourage their focus on intentional client fraud.
Jack went on to explain that federal dollars obtained through this incentive pro-
gram have allowed his unit to upgrade their information technology resources, and
thus enhanced their investigative effectiveness.
Because establishing intentional fraud requires more work than identifying over-
payments without substantiating intent, it is unclear if the comparatively greater
recovered benefit retention rate for intentional fraud charges (35%, rather than
20%) ultimately provides better return on investment. However, fraud investigators,
supervisors, and managers express special interest in the intentional cases that permit
client suspensions and disqualifications, and administrators use intentional fraud
numbers as a primary measure of unit performance. Correspondingly, fraud workers
express comparatively limited interest in violations not officially designated as inten-
tional. In Eastcoast, administrator George came into his position with a mandate
from state officials to overhaul their program integrity system. Among the changes he
stressed was pursuing intentional violations, rather than settling for unintentional
violations. To advance this goal, he hired more investigators, increasing the fraud
unit’s capacity to substantiate comparatively labor-intensive intentional charges. He
also emphasized training and instructing investigators to commit to intentional fraud
charges. George shared bar charts evincing these efforts’ effects; over a three-year
span, his unit went from establishing about five times more unintentional cases than
intentional cases to establishing nearly equal numbers of unintentional and intention-
al cases. Like his counterparts elsewhere, George values intentional fraud cases, and
he is proud of this change; here, he explains how investigators’ habits had contributed
to what he saw as an overrepresentation of unintentional cases (UPVs), and the
administrative steps he took to encourage intentional charges (IPVs):

We had found some of our investigators were going to the hearing stage, and right before
the hearing would start, saying, “Let’s make this a UPV.” We’re not playing that game.
So I said to [a manager], “Get them in here and find out what the hell’s going on and get
back to me.” And he said . . . they were new employees, and they realized as they came
along and the cases were waiting to go to hearing they realized they maybe didn’t have
what they needed to make it an IPV. So I said to him, “Now, no more backing out. If you
call it an IPV going in there—I’ll train well enough now—if you call it an IPV going in,
you’re going to the hearing as an IPV. If we lose it, go with God. You lost it.”

George’s comments demonstrate how the picture of public assistance fraud that
emerges from program integrity efforts depends significantly on those efforts’
direction. As he describes, commitment to intentional fraud charges and corre-
sponding resource allocation (e.g. hiring more investigators and training them to
effectively substantiate fraud charges) allow fraud control units to produce more of
these cases.
Headworth 35

Normative pressures and dispositional attributions

Beyond administrative priorities, normative pressures also push fraud workers
toward attributions of intentionality and internal motivation to rule breakers.
Fraud workers construct visions of clients’ behaviors that support favorable per-
ceptions of fraud control work and the people who do it. They resemble Goffman’s
institutional staff in this sense:

The translation of inmate behavior into moralistic terms suited to the institution’s
avowed perspective will necessarily contain some broad presuppositions as to the char-
acter of human beings. Given the inmates of whom they have charge, and processing
that must be done to them, the staff tend to evolve what may be thought of as a theory
of human nature. As an implicit part of institutional perspective, this theory
rationalizes activity, provides a subtle means of maintaining social distance from inmates
and a stereotyped view of them, and justifies the treatment accorded them
(Goffman 1961:87).

Fraud unit representatives feel some urgency to present their units’ enforcement
actions as appropriate, fair, and deserved. Different individuals interpret and
respond to things differently, but a near-universal feature of fraud workers’ self-
presentation is establishing the blameworthiness of the people they catch and
punish. Like the units they collectively constitute, they experience pressure to
ensure that the synthetic social figure of the welfare rule violator that emerges
from their actions is a person who deserved the punishment she received.
To this end, fraud workers say internal states underlie rule breaking; they empha-
size greed and opportunism as causal forces, and express particular interest in
pursuing cases that they see as fitting this framework. Southeast investigator
Geraldine expresses the core elements of this position, including individual blame-
worthiness for rule violations (especially when continued over time) and the appro-
priateness of punitive responses:

Geraldine: I believe in locking them up [. . .] if they do wrong. Especially like thirty-one

thousand dollars and you did it for five whole years. So you had time to redeem yourself,
so I don’t feel sorry for you at all.
Interviewer: So you’d like to see more jail time?
Geraldine: For the ones who do it for a long time. Five years is too long to be lying, the
same lie. . .This one lady . . . you know she’s making over six figures, I don’t care about
her. Then she gonna call me, “You people.” You people? God, the detective that arrested
her called me, “I have her in the back of my car right now. She ain’t too happy, she’s
crying. She calling you all kinds of names. What do you want me to do?” I said, “Take
her ass to lock up and book her. And take a long time to set her bond. Take your time.”
“So you want in the morning? Or the next day?” I said, “Whatever you feel, detective.”
She was cussing me like it was my fault that she was locked up. [Sarcastic:] Yeah, it’s
not her fault. It’s my fault. I did it [snaps fingers].
36 Punishment & Society 23(1)

Geraldine sees welfare fraud investigators’ role relative to fraud violations as fun-
damentally similar to police officers’ role relative to other offenses. She denies a
meaningful distinction between welfare fraud offenses and conventional property
crimes. To her, welfare rule violations merit harsh punishment, and large cases in
particular should result in incarceration. “I don’t feel sorry for you at all,” Geraldine
says, reflecting fraud workers’ perception of these types of cases as particularly
egregious and blameworthy. In part, the comparative emphasis they place on
cases involving “comfortable” and greedy people suggests these more sensational
and scandalous cases’ disproportionate impact and memorability. But their prom-
inence in the interviews also indicates that focusing on especially blameworthy cases
of people who blatantly abuse the system helps fraud workers explain their work to
themselves and justify it to outsiders (in this case, a sociologist studying them).
These ideas key on distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor (see
Katz 2013[1989]), morally justifying close surveillance and penalization of program
clients by suggesting that large swaths of the clientele—and especially those who
break rules—do not deserve to participate in the first place.
The notion of “need versus greed” distills the tension between situational and
dispositional explanations for rule-violating behavior. Fraud workers attribute most
client fraud to greed. Southwest investigator Sue typifies this perspective: “It’s
mostly greed. [. . .] They’re few, far and in between that you do find that are
need.” Downplaying situational factors relative to dispositional factors, some inves-
tigators accentuate cases involving better-off people, whom they see as especially
blameworthy. The comparative emphasis on such cases reflects how highlighting
punishment in ignominious cases of blatant abuse helps fraud workers justify
their undertaking, to themselves and to outsiders. Southwest investigator Dusty,
for instance, says he regularly encounters well-off people trafficking SNAP benefits:

Dusty: A lot of it that I found is greed, you know. They’re also selling [their EBT card]
because they don’t need it. They’re making $85,000 and they’re getting benefits. That
makes no sense to me. They’re not going to fess up and say they don’t need their benefits
anymore. They’re going to start selling them. They’ll just have more cash in their pocket.
Interviewer: It that something you come into on a regular basis? Someone making six
figures and still receiving benefits?
Dusty: Yep.

And some say that a minority of fraud cases involve clients who are really strug-
gling or violate rules just to make ends meet. Southeast investigator Rosemary, for
example, says that “definitely less than twenty” percent of fraud perpetrators “are
really just trying to get by.” Her colleague Danielle feels similarly:

Danielle: Maybe twenty percent [violate rules] out of necessity. Forty percent, just
normal people seeing if they can get away with it and then the higher percent, [. . .]
I think it’s women whose husbands have these great jobs and everything, they don’t have
a great relationship, he gives her an allowance, and she’s applying for food stamps
Headworth 37

because he’s probably working out of town, working overseas, and she’s still driving her
fancy-ass SUV and got her big ol’ diamond ring on Facebook. She’s like, “I’m going by
food stamps, because he’s, technically, not really in the house, and my friend said I could
get food stamps, and that’s going to get me extra spending money, because I can use this
for food for the kids.” I don’t respect that at all . . . That’s one I’m working on right now
[. . .] I don’t find that’s necessity, because she’s just trying to get one over . . .
Interviewer: You think about those kinds of cases differently, one bothers you more than
the other?
Danielle: Yeah. When I look at DMV and I see the eighty-thousand-dollar Infiniti,
I Google Map the house and it’s parked in the driveway . . . Those kinda make me
mad. Not mad: more motivated to try to get all the information processed quick.

Such sentiments suggest how fraud investigators’ bureaucratic position influences

how they conceptualize and approach the job. Like many of her colleagues,
Danielle feels extra motivation to aggressively pursue cases that involve behavior
she sees as especially blameworthy. While fraud workers are certainly not the only
people who deemphasize poverty’s exigencies and highlight individual responsibil-
ity for breaking rules, their position’s character and imperatives induce such think-
ing. This includes contending that for many clients—especially rule violators—the
struggle isn’t real.
Fraud control’s legitimacy arises especially explicitly in fraud workers’ state-
ments about who deserves fraud scrutiny and who does not. While fraud workers
express particular interest in pursuing clients whom they perceive as especially
blameworthy, they describe a corresponding reluctance to investigate and punish
people whom they see as representatives of the deserving poor, such as older
people and people with disabilities. As expressed above, Southeast investigator
Geraldine has a strong preference for pursuing criminal charges, not just admin-
istrative penalties. Yet she does not favor criminal charges for all rule violators.
She explains sometimes limiting cases to administrative proceedings in terms of the
disapprobation she associates with harshly punishing representatives of the deserv-
ing poor: “Mostly I don’t write up administrative. I go administrative if they’re
elderly or if a young person has a disability . . . that will look bad in a meeting of
our department if we’re putting a blind person in jail.”

Investigators’ situational accounts

As Geraldine’s comments suggest, even generally punitively oriented investigators
make allowances for some cases involving extenuating circumstances. Southeast
supervisor Helen offers her perspective on situational factors, noting the exigencies
that may impel some clients to break rules:

Sometimes if you are desperate enough and you have to feed your family, you do what
you have to do . . . They feel like, “You know what? I’m overwhelmed with my bills, I need
38 Punishment & Society 23(1)

some help, I need some relief.” And that’s what they go and do . . . When your back is up
against the wall and you need to feed your family, you’re not going to tell everything.

Similarly, Eastcoast investigator Diego offers a cogent account of the situational

constraints and pressures that he sees surrounding many clients:

Going back to what we talked about motive . . . You have to, I think, see people’s sit-
uations and try to attempt to understand why they do certain things. Again, I think
there’s no better example than a single mother working at McDonald’s . . . You’ll look at
the pay stubs: person’s working sixty, seventy hours a week, Monday through Saturday,
at McDonald’s, and they’re barely scratching thirty grand a year. And then there’s no
one else in the household, we’ve verified that, and I’ve verified a prison match for the
single father who’s in prison. I know he’s locked up. I know she’s not getting help. She
takes on another job. She works that job, she’s working now, you know, from, from the
moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to bed, and someone’s helping with the kid.
She doesn’t report income . . . on face value she violated program rules. The question is
did she do it intentionally. I don’t know, man . . . She’s scrappin’, you know.

Indeed, as Diego continues, he sees many clients’ circumstances as problematic for

presuming intentionality based on their mandated assent to program rules during
the application process:

If I said to you, “What credit card do you have?” You say, “I have a Visa.” Okay. “What
are the policies for your Visa when your, when your billing cycle is on a short month on a
leap year? Can you quote that to me?” No, you can’t. Because you don’t read your riders,
you don’t read your, your—why? Because you assume that a system is organized enough to
treat you fairly, and you also don’t have the time to do it, right? I think that applies to our
clients as well. They just don’t read those applications? Why? Because they’re just in a
state of just, panic. If it’s not panic, it’s a state of socioeconomic just, pressure. If it’s not
that, it’s the mental health stuff. If it’s not that, it’s the substance abuse stuff. Folks come
in, they’re high, they’re doing their application. Or they’re drinking, they’re a homeless
guy, guy doesn’t even know his last name when he was born. It’s tough.

These reflections on clients’ living conditions and constraints suggest fundamental

philosophical and legal questions about when actions can justifiably be considered
intentional (see Naffine et al., 2001). They also demonstrate that fraud workers do
not speak univocally about deliberateness and blameworthy internal motivations in
rule-violating behavior. Yet, administrative priorities encourage defining rule viola-
tions as deliberate, and normative pressures discourage accentuating unintentional
or environmentally driven violations. As Southwest supervisor Todd explains,
descriptions of fraud control work can elicit approval from members of the public:

When I get to know people and I tell them [what I do], they’re like, “Wow,
really? Those people are out there? Thank you.” I describe what we do and this and
Headworth 39

that and he’s like, “Oh, I’m glad there’s people out there like you, because you’re actu-
ally saving money.”

Such favorable reactions reflect widely held stereotypes about welfare clients’ pur-
poseful abuses of public assistance programs. Narratives presenting the perspective
that emerges from client-focused research—attributing rule violations to misun-
derstandings or situational exigencies—invoke more complicated morality and
policy considerations.
Southwest investigator Ramona compellingly illustrates how normative pres-
sures can influence fraud workers’ descriptions of their work’s subject. Specifically,
she demonstrates a noteworthy tendency to default to dispositional attributions for
fraud behavior, despite apparently contrary experience. When first asked about the
question of “need versus greed,” she definitively cites greed as the more important
causal factor; yet, in response to an immediate follow-up question, she directly
contradicts that claim, estimating that need-driven cases outnumber greed-driven
cases two to one:

Interviewer: Why are people committing benefit fraud? Is it that they’re really trying to
feed the family, subsist, and supplement inadequate benefits, or is it something more? Is it
greed, they’re trying to make some kind of profit? Which one of those do you think is
more of a common driver of benefit fraud?
Ramona: I think it’s greed.
Interviewer: You think it’s greed? How, let’s say if you do thirty cases a month, how
many do you think you’d see on an average month that were cases of someone seriously
in need and wasn’t able to get by, what they needed, based on their benefit allotment?
Zero? One? Ten?
Ramona: I’d probably say twenty need.
Interviewer: Twenty need and ten greed?
Ramona: Yeah.
Interviewer: So in an average month you think there’s twenty cases that are more about
actually meeting needs?
Ramona: Yes.

Although Ramona reports encountering people breaking rules out of need roughly
twice as often as people breaking rules out of greed, her first thought is still to
describe greed as rule breaking’s primary cause. Ramona asserted that most fraud
is greed-driven with alacrity and certainty, and made no indication that she was
aware of the dissonance with her immediately succeeding comments on how she
has actually seen need and greed play out. This contradictory juxtaposition brings
a broader theme into sharp relief. Normative considerations encourage investiga-
tors to conceptualize and describe rule violations as intentional and dispositionally
motivated; Ramona’s comments illustrate how such depictions’ normative
appeal can outweigh work experience as an influence on condensed narratives
about the job.
40 Punishment & Society 23(1)

Discussion and conclusion

Gustafson (2011:166) concludes that “welfare recipients for the most part find it
either difficult or impossible to comply fully with the complex rules regulating their
lives.” Even when people realize that they are possibly or definitely breaking rules,
they often depict such actions as last-ditch efforts to survive destitution. Fraud
workers’ accounts, though, contrast starkly with these depictions, instead present-
ing rule violations as largely intentional and internally motivated. General social
psychological phenomena, as encapsulated in the “fundamental attribution error,”
partially explain this discrepancy. Features of dedicated fraud units’ administrative
priorities and associated normative considerations, however, offer a more com-
plete and contextualized explanation. Organizational and individual pressures
drive enforcement practice to foreground intentionality, conceptualizing and
depicting rule violations as calculated and malicious. Federal and state-level
administration prioritize client-focused investigations, and particularly value inves-
tigations leading to intentional fraud charges. In normative terms, depicting rule
breakers as greedy, not needy, and deliberately abusive of social safety net systems
suggests their blameworthiness and the appropriateness of their punishment, help-
ing to justify and legitimize fraud control activities.
Welfare fraud investigation is a complicated and fraught job. It reflects core
tensions of US poverty relief programs, which aspire to help people, but also
endeavor to closely control recipients and the extent of assistance. Investigators
act as enforcement agents within ostensibly aid-oriented programs,7 a task that
often results in individuals and families losing access to sorely needed resources.
Meditations on the willful and blameworthy character of rule violating behavior
help enforcement actors navigate this occupational terrain.
Fraud control is not just a substantive intervention designed to protect govern-
ment resources. It is also a performance, orchestrated to send signals to clients,
the general public, state officials, and other government departments. Identifying
the archetypical welfare rule violator as dissolute and self-serving and contrasting
her with other, less blameworthy figures supports the notion that surveillance,
administrative penalties, and criminal charges are appropriate governmental
responses to the misallocation or misuse of program benefits. Highlighting the
welfare rule violator’s undesirable characteristics follows from the history of
pathologizing and punishing poverty and helps justify punitive responses. At
the same time, expecting to encounter such actors primes fraud investigators to
find them, further reinforcing preconceived notions about who welfare rule
violators are.
Harmful characterizations of the poor figure prominently in poverty policy
discourse, and constructions of rule violators as fundamentally blameworthy
and deserving of censure are evident in law and policy and administrative
priority-setting (Gring-Pemble, 2003; Hancock, 2004; Stryker and Wald, 2009).
Stereotypical ideas about the poor, welfare recipients, and perpetrators of welfare
fraud undergird anti-fraud interventions, and fraud enforcement personnel invoke
Headworth 41

these ideas to explain and justify their work. Such invocations contribute to the
ideas’ reproduction. Given investigators’ discretion as street-level bureaucrats
(Lipsky 2010[1980]; Riccucci, 2005; Watkins-Hayes, 2009), their perceptions of
rule violators’ characteristics and what motivates (or discourages) them are pivot-
al. Fraud workers’ notions about who rule breakers are—and why they are that
way—shape their approach to originating and pursuing fraud charges, and thereby
fraud control’s substantive outcomes. As investigators do their day-to-day work
and fraud investigations proceed, they help create the subset of clients identified as
rule violators. The same ideas about the poor that serve to justify welfare reform
and retrenchment circulate in welfare rule enforcement, and fraud units’ outcome-
driven imperatives help focus scrutiny on clients who “fit the description” of a
welfare rule violator. Thus, welfare fraud rhetoric has substantially become a self-
fulfilling prophecy, as enforcement operations function to produce the same image
of the welfare rule violator originally invoked to justify their existence.
Given a mandate of investigation and punishment and corresponding incen-
tives, fraud workers demonstrate thinking that reflects their bureaucratic position
and affects their actions within it. Occupational folk wisdom informs fraud work-
ers’ decisions about which potential investigations to pursue and what kinds of
charges to seek; allegations that conform to preexisting ideas about fraud as ava-
ricious and impertinent thereby become more attractive as enforcement targets.
Their thinking about punishments’ purposes also reflects this perspective, as they
stress “making examples” out of stereotype-confirming rule-breakers and incapac-
itating inveterate cheats via suspensions and disqualifications. Van Cleve (2016:58)
notes Cook County’s criminal justice professionals’ labeling of defendants as
“mopes”: irresponsible, immoral people who choose dissolute lifestyles. This dis-
missive and dehumanizing categorization lubricates the criminal process through
justifying mistreatment in court and harsh sentences. The image of the acquisitive,
scheming, amoral rule violator offers similar appeal for welfare bureaucrats work-
ing under punitive adversarialism.
Even welfare clients themselves can favor restrictive policies and share negative
perceptions of others who receive means-tested benefits, and may regard them-
selves as exceptions to a generally blameworthy recipient population (Gustafson,
2011: 3; Hughes, 2019). Some women who rely on public assistance say that they
would feel better about themselves if they were able to discontinue program par-
ticipation (Edin and Lein, 1997: 144). The signals that both clients and other
members of the public receive derive substantially from politicians’ and the
media’s fixation on scandalous fraud incidents (real or fabricated), and benefit
agencies’ own fraud awareness campaigns bolster these images. Fraud control
activities that construct rule breaking as deliberate, parasitic rapaciousness threat-
en to further entrench stereotypes and advance the equation of benefit receipt with
deceit and criminality. Because race is central to stereotypes about welfare, and
especially about fraud (Gustafson, 2011; Hancock, 2004; KohlerHausmann, 2007,
2015), people of color are disproportionately exposed to such demonization and
criminalization.
42 Punishment & Society 23(1)

In total, the welfare fraud investigation context shows how policy structures and
enforcement practices do not just respond to blameworthy or legally culpable
behavior, but help construct narratives of blameworthiness and culpability. Law
and policy have given dedicated welfare fraud investigators a hammer: intentional
fraud charges. Accordingly, investigators are motivated to seek out things that
look like nails, and to assert that the things they struck were nails all along.

Acknowledgement
The author thanks David McElhattan and John Robinson for productive feedback on
earlier drafts and Mona Lynch and two anonymous reviewers at Punishment & Society
for insightful comments and critiques.

ORCID iD
Spencer Headworth https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0075-370X

Notes
1. The US Supreme Court’s decision in Goldberg v. Kelly (397 U.S. 254 [1970]) for-
malized clients’ right to a hearing before agencies could terminate their welfare
benefits due to ineligibility.
2. This same code is the source of the idea of “less eligibility,” the argument that
conditions in prisons should be worse than those experienced under even the
most destitute free-world standards of living, to avoid providing any reason for
the poor to view incarceration as a desirable alternative to participation in the
labor market.
3. For more details on welfare fraud investigation policies and practices, see
Headworth (2019, 2020); Headworth and Ossei-Owusu (2017).
4. These are state-level factors that previous research indicates may influence punitive-
ness in welfare programs. See Beckett and Western (2001); Soss et al. (2011). I
follow Beckett and Western (2001) in using incarceration rate as a measure of
penal punitiveness.
5. The interview guide covered four main topical areas: “your position and your state
fraud control system;” “the work of fraud control;” “benefit fraud as a social
problem;” and “the role of fraud control professionals.”
6. They are univocal and steadfast, however, in affirming that they do not pursue cases
as intentional if they do not believe that the violation in question was deliberate.
7. Fraud workers are not unique is this regard; frontline workers in other ostensibly
supportive or helping-oriented settings also engage in various forms of enforcement,
sometimes leading to formal criminalization. See, for example, Ferguson (2000) and
Rios (2011, 2017) on schools; Lee (2016) and Roberts (2002) on child welfare; and
McKim (2017) on addiction treatment. See generally Morgan and Orloff (2017).

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Cases and statutes cited

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Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254. 1970.

Spencer Headworth is an assistant professor of Sociology at Purdue University and

an Affiliated Scholar of the American Bar Foundation. He received his PhD in
Sociology from Northwestern University in 2016.