dangrossmanFraud investigation is believing your lying eyes
Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so.
What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.
The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.
It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.
It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).
There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.
[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.
[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...
This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.
It's very indirect. The message is "the government is soft on fraud, partially because of liberal values", but the author does everything possible to not actually say it.
I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.
Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.
Well, we live in a world where someone ran for president on the basis of "stopping welfare fraud" that turned out to be mostly a myth, so, you know, context is a thing.
As the article literally says, a whole bunch of people got sent to prison, that seems like pretty solid evidence.
The question is: now what?
Run the rest of them down? Figure out the total scope of the fraud, so we can enact countermeasures to prevent anything like it from happening again?
Fraud targeting social welfare programs is a grave crime; it strikes at public support for those programs. It enriches criminals very specifically at the expense of those people who would most benefit from the program.