Rational skivers or desperate strivers? The problematisation of fraud in the Irish social protection system

Introduction

On 20 April 2016, Assistant Secretary-General John McKeon of the Department of Social Protection (DSP) outlined to a parliamentary committee the post-crisis measures taken by the body which he described as “arguably the largest single public-sector reform initiative over the past ten years” (McKeon, 2016). At the centre of this drive has been the deepening of an activation regime targeting groups designated as ‘furthest from the labour market’: the long-term unemployed, lone-parents and young people aged 16–25. Recent research has criticised the direction of this move, warning that it is increasingly reliant on punitive strategies rather than those that aim to enable welfare claimants to obtain gainful employment (Dukelow, 2015; Murphy, 2016; Millar and Crosse, 2018). It has also been argued their work-first orientation indicates that social protection (SP) “has explicitly become secondary to economic exigencies” (Mulhall, 2013: 186). An augmentation of the DSP’s ability to investigate and punish suspected fraud accompanied this drive – something that has yet to be critically analysed. This article works to fill this gap by interrogating the representation of the problem of welfare fraud in two papers: ‘Department of Social Protection Fraud Initiative 2011–2013’ (DSPFI) September 2011 and the ‘Compliance and Anti-Fraud Strategy 2014–2018’ (CAFS) April 2014.

Studies from various national contexts connect the problematisation of fraud and abuse of welfare payments to a wider project of retrenchment and reformation of the welfare state (Golding and Middleton, 1982; Chunn and Gavigan, 2004). This has been acute during times of economic downturn; such as the wave of ‘scroungerphobia’ in the UK and other countries during the crisis years of the 1970s (Golding and Middleton, 1982; McKeever, 1999). Re-emerging again during the recent financial crisis “as a dichotomous distinction between ‘strivers’ and ‘shirkers’, between those engaging in paid employment and the most visible non-workers” (Patrick, 2016: 245). Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that welfare fraud became a source of controversy in Ireland during an economic downturn that saw unemployment increase from 5.0% in 2007 to 15.5% in 2012 (Eurostat, 2018b). Lone-parents, migrants and young people were increasingly framed by politicians and the media as undeserving or fraudulent abusers of the system – making them ‘scapegoats’ for the financial hardship of the post-crisis era (O’Flynn et al., 2014).

For a period, Ministers of Social Protection, such as Éamon Ó’Cuív, downplayed this ‘problem’ arguing that the overall levels of fraud and error across most programmes were ‘very low’ – ranging from 0% to 2.3% depending on the scheme surveyed (DSP, 2010). However, a change of government in 2011 during Ireland’s economic bailout saw welfare fraud rise to the top of the policy agenda. New measures, as found in the documents that are the focus of this article, were introduced to address perceived deficiencies in the system. We examine them using a framework developed by Bacchi (2009): ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR). This approach, inspired by theoretical insights and research tools first developed by Foucault, works on two propositions: firstly, that it is possible to work our way backwards from a specific policy proposal to identify what a problem is understood to be, and secondly that the resulting problematisations are key to how we are governed (Bletsas, 2012: 38). As such, we treat the documents not as reactive but as productive. Rather than merely responding to a problem in society they also construct the problem in a manner that constitutes a certain order. Consequently, we argue that the representations of the problem of welfare fraud present in these documents offer insights into the workfarist reformation of the Irish SP system. The practices they outline predominantly problematise fraud as an act carried out by entrepreneurial ‘rational actors’ – minimising alternative problematisations of abuse related to financial desperation and errors made by claimants or DSP staff. Ultimately, welfare claimants are subjectified in these documents as what we term ‘rational skivers’, as calculative individuals who engage with the system cynically from the outset and will commit fraud if they determine there is a high chance of ‘getting away with it’. However, these documents also serve to silence an alternative problematisation widely apparent within the literature that examines structural explanations for welfare fraud – that which we term a ‘desperate striver’ trapped between an ungenerous welfare system and an inaccessible labour market. Furthermore, these documents constitute welfare claimants as subjects under constant surveillance and discipline, reinforcing the workfarist turn, but also serving to undermine the legitimacy of the welfare system in the eyes of claimants and wider society.

Welfare fraud in the literature

The literature on welfare fraud is fragmented between the disciplines of criminal law, criminology, sociology, and policy analysis – insights from these respective fields rarely come into dialogue with each other. In this section we partially remedy this lacuna by providing a brief sketch of some of the key findings from the literature.

In most contexts empirical evidence on the occurrence of fraud is ambiguous – with the conflation of fraud and error within official indicators being a widespread phenomenon (Chunn and Gavigan, 2004; McKeever, 2012; Lundström, 2013). Welfare fraud is a form of crime typically understood to be ‘high volume, low cost’ (Doig, 2006; McKeever, 2012). It primarily consists of claimants intentionally withholding information about their means or living circumstances or working on the side. More serious but less common are cases of sophisticated deception using false documents, ‘welfare tourism’ or identity theft – which tend to be more prominent within media representations of the issue. Nevertheless, authorities in many contexts argue that tolerance of low-level abuse or ‘rule-bending’ will serve to encourage those more serious forms of fraud (McKeever, 2012).

Policy research on welfare fraud suggests that policies which focus on the prevention of ‘situational opportunities’ for the crime and on ‘targeted early intervention’ on ‘high-risk’ claimants are the most successful in terms of reducing the rate of fraud – at least temporarily (Prenzler, 2016). This ‘prevention’ paradigm focuses on designing or managing environments to limit the opportunities to commit crime and “to increase the effort and risks of crime and reduce the rewards” (Clarke, 1992: 4 cited in Newburn, 2017: 600). Anti-fraud measures drawing upon the ‘deterrence’ paradigm advocating a strategy of ‘zero tolerance’ are also widespread – despite the chequered empirical record of such an approach (Young, 2011). It argues that ‘order maintenance’ is crucial to the prevention of crime – that severe treatment of seemingly minor transgressions can lead to a subjective sense of security for the general population and a subsequent reduction in the rate of serious crime. Wilson and Kelling (1982: 9) invoked modern medicine as an inspiration for this framework, specifically its focus on ‘fostering health’ rather than merely treating disease. This reflects a wider trend of the influence of medical knowledge upon diverse fields of public-policy formation and analysis, evident in the turn towards ‘evidence-based’ policy based on the premise that it “is possible to measure and assess interventions in the real world against specified outcomes” (Bacchi, 2009: 105).

Becker’s (1968) ‘economic approach’ to crime and punishment also influences both paradigms. They share the assumption that criminals are rational actors, thus increasing the cost of crime will discourage individuals from pursuing such activities. Both paradigms also draw upon ‘social interventionist’ theories which view crime and criminals as arising from environmental or pathological roots (Bacchi, 2009). Both are rooted in research and policies developed in the United States, a context noted for being ‘one of the most atypical advanced industrial societies’ when it comes to crime (Young, 2011). All in all, the mainstream approach to the issue of welfare fraud conforms heavily to what Young (2011: 199) termed the “nomothetic impulse” of positivist criminology whose reliance on abstract empiricism and universalised rationality serves to either “eliminate culture as part of human behaviour or view it as fixed or static”.

The assumption of pure calculative rationality at the heart of both paradigms is unsettled even in the mainstream criminological literature on fraud which argues the motivations can be placed on a continuum spanning from ‘need’ to ‘greed’ (Doig, 2006; Kim and Maroulis, 2015; Prenzler, 2016). Offences involving small sums of money, like most welfare fraud cases, are understood to stem from economic deprivation or social needs rather than self-interested and premeditated calculation. Research conducted with ‘fraudsters’ and ‘fiddlers’ following the 1990s intensification of anti-fraud measures in the United States and the United Kingdom found they broke the rules because they ‘could not make ends meet’ (Dean and Melrose, 1997; Swan et al., 2008). Furthermore, Williams (2001: 730) stresses that undeclared work performed by the unemployed is largely driven by social rather than economic motives as it is carried out “for friends, relatives, and neighbours in order either to help them out or to cement or forge social networks, or both”. Research into those who commit fraud also suggests that deterrence strategies will fail to end what most perpetrators already find to be a “stressful and relatively unrewarding activity” (Dean and Melrose, 1997: 113). Indeed, interviews with lone-parents prosecuted for fraud in California suggest these punitive approaches served to compound the economic desperation that drove the crime in the first place (Swan et al., 2008). This suggests welfare fraud largely stems from structurally imposed material deprivation and/or relations of mutual aid within marginalised communities rather than premeditated behaviour by entrepreneurial criminals.

McKeever’s (1999, 2012) work from a criminal law perspective offers more unsettling insights based upon the implementation of the ‘deterrence’ strategy in the UK and Australia SP systems. She finds that the ‘criminalisation’ of minor offences reconfigured the “version of social citizenship claimants must comply with while normalising the stereotype of claimants as welfare cheats” (2012: 473). This suggests the zero-tolerance approach could have the subjectification effect of constructing all welfare claimants as potential criminals in the eyes of authorities and the public. A consequence which could have deleterious effects for the legitimacy of the system itself (Dean and Melrose, 1997). This outcome can be predicted for two reasons – an increasing lack of trust in welfare institutions by the general populace, and promotion of the belief that ‘everyone is doing it’ by anti-fraud awareness campaigns potentially becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This conforms with a long-standing insight from critical criminology that attempts at social control often have ‘ironic’ or counter-productive effects (Young, 2011: 202).

On a macro level, it is apparent from the literature that a backlash against welfare recipients as fraudulent or otherwise undeserving of assistance – often with a gendered or racialised focus – has been sustained to varying degrees across the Global North since the crises of the 1970s (Golding and Middleton, 1982; Ajzenstadt, 2009; Wacquant, 2009; Lundström, 2013). This period also saw the emergence of neoliberalism – a “set of discourses, practices and apparatuses” which work to universalise “the logic of competition and the enterprise model” – as the hegemonic rationality of capitalism (Dardot and Laval, 2013: 4–5). A defining feature of this turn has been the spread of welfare reforms and deregulatory labour policies intent on disciplining labour on behalf of capital (Umney et al., 2018). Dean and Melrose (1997: 117) link the two trends – the promotion of distrust in the SP system providing a “symbolically significant component to the strategic orchestration of discipline in an increasingly polarized society; a manageable kind of discord”. This hypothesis is lent weight by Hall (2011) and Wacquant (2009) who highlight that the targeting of poor and marginalised groups with discourses of ‘law and order’, and a resulting expansion of disciplinary and carceral powers held by the state, has been a major component of neoliberalism in France, the United States and the UK.

Therefore, the mainstream vista of the ‘problem’ of welfare fraud positions it as a premeditated act performed by rational but deviant individuals. On the other hand, the critical literature positions it as being brought about by dynamics on the societal level. It is seen as an ‘ironic’ outcome of the combination of a punitive welfare state and an increasingly inaccessible labour market, and/or as a moral panic fomented by state elites and the mass media to further the retrenchment and workfarist reorientation of SP.

Crisis, welfare reform and the problem of fraud in Ireland

The documents analysed were introduced in a context of economic and political upheaval in Ireland. The local institutions and policies that made the country an ‘exemplar’ of global neoliberalism also left it highly exposed to the 2007/2008 financial crisis (McDonough, 2018). The bursting of a property bubble, the resultant disastrous attempt by the state to rescue the banking sector, and a sharp decline in international demand all resulted in years of economic turmoil (Drudy and Collins, 2011). Unemployment reached its highest levels in a generation, spurred by the collapse of the construction and retail sectors. This had a knock-on impact on SP expenditure from 18.1% of GDP in 2007 to 25.2% by 2010 (Eurostat, 2018a).

O’Hearn (2003) notes the ‘class character’ of Ireland’s boom where growing inequality was exacerbated by regressive tax policies and public spending constraints. The bust intensified this trend with a series of austerity budgets reducing public expenditure while increasing regressive forms of taxation. This process intensified following a ‘bailout’ in 2010 by the Troika of the International Monetary Fund, European Commission and European Central Bank. The resulting Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) detailed an expansion of austerity measures, and the implementation of “an IMF style structural adjustment program” (McDonough, 2018: 19). The SP system being one of its prime targets (Hick, 2018).

The economic upheaval was complemented by upsets in the political system. Fianna Fail, the centre right political party which has held power in the state for 61 of its 96 years, suffered a historic defeat in the 2011 election, held a few months after the arrival of the Troika. They were replaced by a Fine Gael and Labour coalition that commanded a strong majority within the parliament. Fine Gael is a Christian Democratic party considered to be socially conservative, with liberal economic policies. The junior coalition partner the Labour Party is typically classified as a social democratic party (Murphy, 2016; Millar et al., 2019). However, Labour’s recent policy implementation and discourses mobilised in office mark them as a ‘pro-austerity’ party (McDonough, 2018: 26). A Labour member of parliament Joan Burton was the Minister for Social Protection responsible for the implementation of reforms to the DSP. Though this government expressed some discomfort with the ‘affordability’ of the bailout package negotiated by their predecessors, they set about pursuing the objectives of the MOU with gusto (Dukelow, 2015; Murphy, 2016). Indeed, it is important to avoid the perception that the implementation of reforms was solely fuelled by the government finding itself accountable to external actors. On the contrary, there was much more autonomy for local political actors over the implementation of the MOU than commonly perceived (Murphy, 2014; Dukelow, 2015). Hick (2018: 7) notes many of the commitments imposed by the Troika stemmed from policy aspirations on the part of policymakers prior to the bailout and that “what changed during the crisis was the impetus to translate these policy aspirations into practice”. Indeed, lone-parent labour market activation policy proposals which had been published in 2006 were implemented in the wake of the bailout. Millar et al. (2019: 7) contend that “politicians previously concerned about the reaction of the electorate could point to the conditions of the Troika bailout to justify such a shift in SP towards lone-parents … which had been aspired to since the 2006 proposals”.

2011 marked the beginning of extensive reforms to the SP system. The new minister Joan Burton oversaw the establishment of Intreo – a new ‘one-stop shop’ that brought together all employment and income services. 2012 saw the launch of the policy document ‘Pathways to Work’ (GOI, 2012) which outlined a series of new activation schemes targeting the long-term unemployed and those deemed to be at risk of falling into that category. Overall, these reforms have intensified the ‘work-first’ orientation of the welfare state (Murphy, 2016; Millar and Crosse, 2018). The first of the documents that form the focus of this study was published in 2011 marking another intensification – of the problematisation of fraud as a threat to the functioning of Ireland’s welfare state.

Even before the crisis, commentators noted a strong ‘anti-fraud rhetoric’ amongst politicians and those tasked with administering the SP system (Murphy, 2008). Certainly, the preceding Fianna Fail-led coalition demonstrated a keenness to maintain an image of being tough on fraud and abuse of the system – with migrants being a target of rhetoric and measures implemented in this period. For example, plans for airport checkpoints targeting ‘welfare commuters’ from Eastern Europe were mooted (O’Brien, 2009). However, as Millar et al. (2019: 8) note, Fianna Fail were reluctant to implement significant SP reform proposals “due to a lack of political commitment and concern about public opinion”. This may explain why in contrast to the post-2011 government, successive ministers stressed what they argued to be low levels of fraud within the system and the capacity of the department to deal with this issue. As late as December 2010, just weeks after the arrival of the Troika and the increased fiscal pressure that entailed, a speech by the then minister, Ó’Cuív declared that current anti-fraud measures were sufficient:

The level of fraud on most schemes is very low. As reported by the C&AG, the percentage of expenditure resulting from fraud identified in the Department’s Fraud and Error surveys was 0% for pensioners, 0.1% for Illness Benefit, 0.8% for the Family Income Supplement, 1.8% for Child Benefit and 2.3% for the Disability Allowance. (DSP, 2010)

Despite such assurances, fraud and abuse of this system was gaining currency as a problematisation within the media and the opposition benches. One illustration of this can be given by searching for the term ‘welfare fraud’ on the Irish Newspaper Archive. ¹ A search from 1 January 2000 to 1 January 2015 returns more than 790 results. Of these 467 (59%) were published in the period 2010–2014. The topic also surfaced on television with the broadcast on 7 December 2009 by RTÉ, the state broadcaster, of an episode of the current affairs programme Prime Time Investigates dedicated to SP fraud. In 2012, the channel settled a defamation case with one of those featured who argued that they had erroneously depicted her as having committed fraud (O’Halloran, 2012). TV3, a private channel, screened an episode of Paul Connolly Investigates about welfare fraud on a regular basis between 2011 and 2013 (O’Flynn et al., 2014). A press release from One Family (2013) – an organisation representing lone-parents – challenged media coverage of welfare fraud arguing that the estimates of the levels being quoted were “poorly estimated” and requesting that “media and policy makers stop perpetuating notions of the deserving and undeserving poor”. This fits in with research which has argued certain groups of welfare claimants such as lone-parents, migrants or the young unemployed were targeted as ‘undeserving’ during this period (O’Flynn et al., 2014: 928–930).

Methodology

This section outlines the theoretical framework and methodology utilised to determine how fraud has been problematised in Irish SP policy. WPR is a post-structuralist form of policy analysis developed by Bacchi (2009). Theoretically it is indebted to the work of Foucault, particularly his conceptualisation of power as having a ‘productive role’ rather than being limited to a repressive or negative function (1977, 1978). Within the wider policy analysis literature, WPR lies closest to those who work on the question of problem definition and framing. However, it departs from the presuppositions that commonly underpin this area of inquiry. Two propositions lie at the heart of Bacchi’s approach. Firstly, that “what we say we want to do about something indicates what we think needs to change and hence how we constitute the ‘problem’” (Bacchi, 2012: 4). Therefore, the researcher can work her way backwards from any policy proposal in a text towards what the problem is understood to be or as Bacchi terms it the ‘problem representation’. In contrast to interpretivist approaches, the significance of this ‘representation’ is not as a collection of images or semiotics, nor is the issue merely that one specific interpretation of the policy ‘problem’ has been chosen over rival ‘problems’. Rather, the importance of this ‘representation’ is the effects it has on how we perceive our social reality. Here, Bacchi is channelling the argument of Shapiro that “representations do not imitate reality but are the practices through which things take on meaning and value” (1988: xi). Hence, ‘problem representations’ or ‘problematisations’ inscribed within texts such as policy documents are understood to constitute the ‘reality’ through which we are governed (Bacchi, 2016). This leads to the second premise of WPR, that these resulting problematisations are crucial to the practice of government (Bacchi, 2009). Here the WPR approach to policy analysis is indebted to scholars of governmentality, such as Dean, Miller and Rose, who have built upon the work of Foucault and developed a field of research that examines the “strategies, techniques and procedures through which different authorities seek to enact programmes of government in relation to the materials and forces to hand and the resistances and oppositions anticipated or encountered” (Rose, 1996: 42).

These two propositions enable policy analysts to challenge the prevailing view of policy which treats ‘problems’ as exterior to the policymaking process, waiting patiently to be solved by politicians and experts. Instead, policies should be seen to produce or constitute ‘problems’ as particular forms of problems based upon certain assumptions or presuppositions (Bacchi, 2009). Hence, the focus of the researcher moves towards how the practices and relations of power encoded within policies produce specific ‘problems’, ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘places’ (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 29). WPR involves applying a series of six research questions (Table 1) to ‘practical’ texts, a terminology used by Foucault for texts that “describe how people ought to behave, how societies ought to be constructed” (O’Farrell, 2005: 77). Though studies using WPR tend to use policy documents, it has also been applied to a range of other forms of source material including mass media, speeches and interviews.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR) approach to policy analysis.

Q1: What’s the problem ‘welfare fraud’ represented to be in a specific policy or policies?

Q2: What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions (conceptual logics) underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?

Q3: How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

Q4: What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be conceptualised differently?

Q5: What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

Q6: How and where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

Step 7: Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations

Source: Adapted from Bacchi and Goodwin (2016: 20).

Q1 opens the research process by identifying a problem representation implicit within the action being proposed by the policy. The following questions interrogate this problematisation: Q2 deploys the Foucauldian tool of ‘archaeology’ to reveal the epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning it. It is important to stress that we are not seeking to identify presuppositions or assumptions held by policymakers but those ‘conceptual logics’ lodged within the problem representation itself (Bacchi, 2009: 5). Q3 employs the tools of ‘genealogy’ to trace the ‘descent’ and ‘emergence’ of the problematisation. Q4 involves asking what ‘silences’ are contained within a policy? This includes determining the limits to the problem representation that we have uncovered; we ask, “what fails to be problematized?” (Bacchi, 2009: 12). Q5 involves the critical assessment of the various effects produced by the problem representation for the ‘object’ of a policy. Q6 moves the focus to the production and dissemination of the problematisation and existing or potential resistance to it. By following this process of interrogation of the encoded problematisation, analysts ‘take a step back’ from the policy being analysed to challenge what otherwise would be ‘taken-for-granted’. This process is cemented by a seventh supplementary step which requires the researcher to critically examine their own findings and alternative policy preferences using the same series of questions, to ensure ‘self-reflexivity’ regarding the problematisations which they have brought to their analysis. Here, due to the constraints of space we followed the lead of Pantazis (2016) in applying this framework in a truncated form. We focus primarily on Q1, Q2 and Q4. While the other questions inform our research, further work will be required to fully address them.

Data

This study applies the WPR framework to two anti-fraud strategy documents published by the DSP: ‘Department of Social Protection Fraud Initiative 2011–2013’ (DSPFI, 2011) and the ‘Compliance and Anti-Fraud Strategy 2014–2018’ (CAFS, 2014). Both were developed during the Fine Gael–Labour coalition of 2011–2016. While elements of the representation of the problem of welfare fraud predate this coalition, it is under their stewardship that it became a priority issue, as signalled by its presence as a key element of the fiscal strategy of their ‘Programme for Government’ (Department of the Taoiseach, 2011). One difference between the two texts is that the drafting of the 2014 edition involved external consultation, with other state agencies and departments, voluntary and anti-poverty organisations, trade unions and employer organisations all providing commentary on the content of the paper, a process which did not occur during the drafting of the 2011 document (CAFS, 2014: 5). These texts are valued as sources for WPR analysis as they are prescriptive; the policies contained within and their accompanying methods of implementation form a key point of entry into the problematisations that form our object of scrutiny. When it comes to exploring the effects of the problematisation encoded within these documents we rely primarily upon secondary research from other contexts – due to a lack of availability of primary data or secondary research in the Irish context. Our analysis highlights that the problem is represented as a premeditated criminal act of ‘fraud’ perpetrated by rational actors. Alternative problematisations of ‘abuse’ or ‘error’ are minimised. The practices inscribed within the documents are highly reliant upon a deterrence and prevention style response – meaning there is an erasure of societal or institutional explanations for this problem with potentially harmful effects for welfare claimants and the wider populace.

Fraud, abuse and error

What is striking across the documents is the way a certain problematisation – that of ‘fraud’ or ‘fraudulent activity’ – is predominant. A problem representation of premeditated criminal activity can be traced back from the proposed actions throughout both documents – where the accent is firmly placed upon ‘prevention and detection’ and ‘sanctions, deterrence and debt recovery’. In the DSPFI (2011: 6–7) the principal types of behaviour considered to constitute fraud are clearly outlined – “concurrent working & claiming”, “non-disclosure of means”, “multiple claiming or personation”, “life events” (e.g. not reporting changes in marital status), “cohabitation”, “social insurance and employer non compliance” and “non residency in the state”. Notably there is no attempt to distinguish between these activities in terms of their levels of seriousness in either of the documents.

While these texts predominantly provide a problem representation of ‘fraud’, two subordinate problematisations are also inscribed within – the problems of ‘abuse’ and ‘error’. The weight given to them is lesser. In the DSPFI the word ‘fraud’ or derivatives such as ‘fraudulent’ or ‘defraud’ appear 181 times – while the terms ‘abuse’ and ‘error’ appear 24 times respectively. This ratio fails to change significantly in the CAFS, though the addition of ‘compliance’ in the title suggests somewhat of a shift. Significantly, there is a consistent failure to clearly define what is meant by either of these terms. This potentially makes ‘abuse’ and ‘error’ examples of what Foucault (1978: 101) would term a “confused category”, a transgression which could provoke repercussions ranging from “extreme severity” to “tolerance” depending on the context.

Certain actions proposed in the documents also indicate the presence of these subordinate problematisations and following the WPR methodology we learn more about how policy has constituted them. One proposal in the DSPFI is to introduce an “integrated approach to control” and payment arrangements that are “simplified and streamlined” such as a Single Working Age Payment (2011: 5). Here we detect a problematisation of the ‘complexity’ or ‘inflexibility’ of bureaucracy leading to claimants committing inadvertent errors or abusing the system due to what is described as the “perceived” difficulty of reporting changes in their status (2011: 5). Both documents specify the need to ensure claimants are aware of their “rights & responsibilities”, giving further indication of the existence of this problematisation (2011: 5–6; 2014: 8). However, the proposals within the text largely serve to reconfigure the problem of abuse as being on the same level as premeditated fraud, with offences that may previously have been considered the former being reconstituted as the latter. The CAFS notably introduces the problem of error on the department’s side with the recommendation to “ensure our staff receive appropriate training to process claims correctly” (2014: 8). However, this is an isolated incidence of this alternative problematisation within the documents.

One reason the predominance of ‘fraud’ is so striking is the failure of the indicators relied upon in either document to disentangle it as a separate phenomenon from the subordinate problematisations of abuse and error. The first measure is of ‘control saving’ – a departmental estimation of the losses that would be made if no check or controls were to occur. Secondly, the documents determine that ‘fraud and error surveys’, periodic investigations of the level of fraud within specific benefit schemes, shall be used to measure the progress of the department in combatting fraud. Significantly, both indicators fail to distinguish between moneys saved or lost to fraud and those lost to behaviour deemed as abusive or errors made by claimants and/or the department itself (Oireachtas Library and Research Service, 2011: 5–6). Despite this lack of a clear indicator that distinguishes between ‘fraud’, ‘abuse’ or ‘error’, the intentional exploitation of the system by criminal actors is the dominant problem representation inscribed within these texts. However, this problematisation of fraud draws upon differing sets of knowledges or paradigms related to the field of criminology.

The problem(s) of fraud?

The anti-fraud proposals outlined in the documents draw upon two intertwined understandings of the problem of crime – as being perpetrated by shrewd actors who calculate they have a high chance of ‘getting away with it’ and that of crime being more likely when the environment provides favourable opportunities for it. The first understanding underpins a group of proposals which grant powers to the authorities to further the process of ‘deterrence, sanctions and debt recovery’ (herein referred to as deterrence). The measures outlined involve an increased ability to sanction claimants, increased powers to pursue claimants for debts to the grave and beyond, and ensuring the prosecution of fraud cases deemed ‘serious’ within the legal system (2011: 14–16; 2014: 14–16). The assumption underpinning this approach appears clearly in the CAFS:

Where an individual committing social welfare fraud thinks that the potential penalty or sanction is minimal, relative to the potential gain, then fraudulent activity will be encouraged and will most likely continue. (2014: 14)

Here we see the influence of Becker’s (1968) conceptualisation of the criminal as a rational, calculative actor. Another clue as to the influence of the deterrence paradigm appears in the minister’s foreword to the DSPFI (2011: 3) which notes that the government has committed itself to “a zero tolerance approach to social welfare fraud”.

The second understanding underpins the group of proposals that seek to boost the department’s practices of ‘prevention and detection’. These seek to prevent fraud by removing the ‘excuses for crime’ by streamlining bureaucracy and educating the public of their ‘rights and responsibilities’ (2011: 5–6). They also seek to detect fraud by increased cooperation between governmental agencies and other actors, in addition to the activities of the Special Investigative Unit (SIU). In the CAFS (2014: 11) there is a clear shift towards furthering these practices of prevention through the deployment of technology capable of ‘predictive analytical techniques’ to detect non-compliance. This focus on increased technologies of counting and surveillance in the DSPFI and CAFS reflects an inclination towards the prevention paradigm.

Another alternative problematisation of fraud as stemming from a social pathology surfaces in the proposed usage of advertising campaigns that aim to promote “fraud reporting arrangements” and to “highlight the negative effects of social welfare fraud” (DSPFI, 2011: 13). Here we have the representation of the problem of fraud as stemming from “social norms & behaviour” wherein there has been the development in the moral outlook of certain sections of the population which leads them to view certain forms of ‘abuse’ of the system as a “victimless crime” (2011: 6). In a case of explicit intertextuality, the DSPFI (2011: 6) cites research on the public perception of fraud in the UK by the Department for Work and Pensions to underpin this problem representation.

This emphasis upon public awareness and education about responsibilities suggests a connection with technologies developed within modern medicine in pursuit of ‘fostering health’ by encouraging those behaviours considered healthy or beneficial and discouraging those considered unhealthy or harmful. In other words, the aim here is to produce welfare claimants and the wider citizenry as subjects who, in keeping with a long-standing goal of liberal modes of governance, are willing to “govern themselves, master themselves, care for themselves” (Rose, 1996: 45). Following such logic, these documents work to constitute a ‘customer’ who is aware of their responsibilities to provide accurate information when making a claim and a ‘good citizen’ who exercises vigilance over claimants and is willing to report those who defraud the system.

Overall, the practices of deterrence and prediction within the DSPFI predominantly constitute those who commit ‘fraud’ as rational subjects motivated by greed: if the cost of their deviant behaviour rises, they will comply with the rules. This will be achieved by expanding the state’s ability to punish offenders, whilst seeking to prevent the offence by closing off environmental opportunities to commit fraud in the first place. Additionally, there is the problematisation of a social pathology discernible from the belief that if minor infractions are tolerated there will be an increase in the incidence of more serious crime. Therefore, changing social norms via the promotion of public awareness about ‘rights and responsibilities’ within the welfare system and the need to report deviants is key to the strategy. Such an approach to fraud which focuses primarily on the ‘opportunity structure’ for crime and ‘prevention’ is in keeping with ‘evidence-based’ policy research into ‘what works’ (Prenzler, 2016). However, the predominant problematisation underpinning this approach leaves deep silences and potentially has harmful effects for welfare claimants and Irish society at large.

The problem of scarce resources

It is important to note another key problematisation which first appears in the then minister Burton’s foreword in the DSPFI (2011: 1):

I am very conscious that the vast majority of people who turn to my Department for support played no part in causing this financial crisis and I will do my best to ensure that the burden of resolving the crisis does not fall disproportionately on their shoulders. One of my key priorities, therefore, is to ensure that the Department’s reduced resources are targeted at the people who need these most. This is why I have asked my Department to step up its efforts to combat fraudulent activity … to target fraud to the value of at least €625 million next year.

Here we have the problematisation of fraud as a threat to the fiscal wellbeing of the state, and its ability to provide for those in need. This problem representation is stronger in the DSPFI document, coming in the wake of the bailout. However, it remains in the background throughout the CAFS document with a reference to “scarce resources” (2014: 3) in the minister’s foreword and the continued usage of the term ‘savings’ to refer to money recouped through the measures outlined as was established in the DSPFI document. This problematisation moves the department towards what Rose (1996: 55) dubs “budgetization”, a focus on problems in cash terms which serves to displace other epistemological means of evaluating their impact.

The obvious silence here does not even require leaving this paradigm. Is intentional fraud really such a major threat to the state’s budget? As previously noted, the DSP’s own statistics on fraud show that the problem is not endemic. As such, is the acquiring of new surveillance technologies that require ‘substantial’ investment (CAFS, 2014: 11–12) a cost-effective use of resources? One striking opinion piece from this period disputes this and notes the drive to pursue welfare fraudsters aided the silencing of an alternative problematisation of tax evasion;

In the ten-year period to 2009, there were 3,183 prosecutions for welfare fraud which resulted in fines of €43m – a sum which was rather dwarfed by the €2.25bn secured by Revenue investigations into tax evasion during the same period. (Browne, 2012)

Discussion: Rational skivers or desperate strivers?

Our analysis of the DSPFI and CAFS highlights the problematisation of welfare fraud in Ireland as a crime carried out by greedy individuals who calculate that they have a good chance of getting away with committing fraud – a subjectification we term the ‘rational skiver’. The DSP documents analysed serve to make this representation of ‘fraud’ predominant, amalgamating offences that may previously have been considered ‘abuse’ with serious and organised attempts to defraud the system. They also minimise the alternative problem of ‘error’.

The measures outlined – to deter and/or prevent – constitute ‘fraudsters’ as rational actors who will attempt it as long as the opportunity exists or there is a reasonable expectation of getting away with it. In doing so this problematisation serves to downplay or silence other interpretations of why fraudulent behaviour occurs (leaving aside genuine errors on the part of the claimant). The taken-for-granted status of this problematisation is signalled by the disinterest within these documents about exactly who commits fraud and why – save for one vague proposal in the DSPFI (2011: 32) to commission a study into welfare fraud and factors influencing it “if feasible”. Therefore, fraud is coded as a problem stemming from deviant individuals and as external to the SP system and society itself.

Little to no attention is afforded to representations of the problem as internal to the welfare system and wider economic institutions – i.e. the ungenerosity of available supports and a lack of alternatives in the labour market. This is despite the widespread presence of this problematisation within the literature on welfare fraud and the contemporaneous context in Ireland of high unemployment and economic hardship combined with an increasingly ungenerous welfare state. Furthermore, while it is undoubtable that serious premeditated cases of fraud do occur, the rather low numbers of criminal prosecutions as indicated in the CAFS (2014: 31) suggest that most offences detected are petty in nature and dealt with using internal sanctioning mechanisms. If so, following the presumptions of the ‘need vs greed’ continuum, economic desperation rather than calculative greed could be the prevailing factor. The hegemony of this problematisation of individualised deviant behaviour is reminiscent of the findings of ‘Policing the Crisis’ by Hall et al. (1978) regarding the moral panic about mugging in Britain during the Thatcher-led neoliberal turn. There too did we see the deployment of a ‘law and order’ discourse that served to “abstract individual effects from the contradictory structures which produce them” (Hall et al., 1978: x).

All this suggests an alternative problematisation of ‘welfare fraud’ as a behaviour forced upon claimants caught between a rock and a hard place – shifting the focus of policy towards tackling societal inequities and institutional failings rather than focusing on moral deficits on the individual level. However, this could lead to a subjectification we term the ‘desperate striver’ – constituting such individuals as ‘victims’ or ‘socially excluded’ and thus merely expanding the realm of the ‘deserving poor’. Ironically, such an outcome would soften rather than overcome the dividing practices at play in the policy documents analysed by this article – and thus still obstruct the articulation of collective solidarities and radical egalitarianism needed to fully challenge the neoliberal consensus.

Conclusion

The ‘anti-fraud’ strategies examined in this article came at a time when a sizeable section of the populace had become reliant upon the SP system. With that in mind it is striking how predominant the problematisation of fraud perpetrated by rational and calculative criminal actors is. Meanwhile, alternative problematisations of ‘abuse’ and ‘error’ are minimised. Another alternative problematisation, that of economic desperation, is notable for its absence within these documents. Furthermore, these documents move to recode both serious and minor infractions within the unitary category of ‘fraud’. Findings from other jurisdictions suggest that this could serve to compound the economic hardship experienced by those on the margins of the system. New powers to surveil and punish welfare claimants outlined in these documents clearly constitute them as subjects of suspicion and distrust – essentially all claimants are to be considered potential criminals. Coming at a time of increased scapegoating of marginalised groups and an increasingly workfarist approach to SP it is hard not to think back to Dean and Melrose’s (1997) diagnosis of welfare fraud as a form of ‘manageable discord’ enabling an expansion of the state’s disciplinary powers and a radical reconfiguration of welfare provision.