1st Edition

Policing Welfare Fraud The Government of Welfare Fraud and Non-Compliance

By Scarlet Wilcock Copyright 2024
202 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

202 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

202 Pages 5 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Policing Welfare Fraud charts and interrogates the suite of measures ostensibly designed to combat welfare fraud and non-compliance. In Australia, which serves as the empirical focus of this book, these strategies include stringent ID checks, pre-emptive data surveillance technologies including the infamous and illegal ‘robodebt’ programme, a dedicated fraud hotline and an ‘intelligence-led’... Read more

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgements

Funding

List of Abbreviations

Disclaimer

1 Introduction

2 A History of Welfare Fraud Policing

3 Governing Welfare Fraud and Non-compliance in Neoliberal Times

4 Preventing or Pre-empting Welfare Compliance? Policing the Borders of the Welfare State

5 Managing ‘Risky’ Recipients: Data Mining Risk Profiling and Tiered Compliance Reviews

6 Making Welfare Fraud ‘Everybody’s Business’: Responsibilising Welfare Compliance

7 Deterrence, Disruption, Deservingness: Prosecuting Welfare Fraud in Australia

8 Conclusion

Index

Biography

Scarlet Wilcock is Lecturer at Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, Australia, and an Associate Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.

'In the aftermath of Australia’s internationally infamous Robodebt scandal, Policing Welfare Fraud is a must read for understanding the decades’ long blending of the welfare and penal states in Australia. Through incisive empirical analysis, Wilcock demonstrates how welfare is governed through fraud, even though most debts are not fraudulent. She contests grand narratives of the criminalisation of poverty, showing that welfare compliance regimes are more messy, contradictory and complicated, thus highlighting how contemporary welfare can be otherwise enacted.'

Professor Paul Henman, Professor for Digital Sociology & Social Policy, University of Queensland

'An incisive and sophisticated examination of how Australia’s welfare compliance regime emerged from a program of neo-liberal welfare 'reform' which seeks to stigmatise 'welfare dependency', 'govern through fraud', assemble punitive compliance regimes and criminalise welfare recipients. Compelling reading.'

Emeritus Professor David Brown, Faculty of Law and Justice, University of New South Wales