(De-)Criminalizing Welfare? The Rise and Fall of Social Security Fraud Prosecutions in Australia

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (6) ◽  
pp. 1498-1519
Author(s):  
Scarlet Wilcock
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Human Services ◽  
Zero Tolerance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Industrialized Nations ◽  
Tolerance Approach ◽  
Welfare Fraud ◽  
Prosecution Strategies ◽  
Australian Department

Abstract The social security fraud prosecution rate has fallen by approximately 74.9 per cent in Australia since 2010. This is remarkable considering the national dialogue continues to propound a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to fraud in the welfare system. Drawing on interviews with compliance staff from the Australian Department of Human Services, documentary research and a Foucauldian governmentality analytic, this article charts and interrogates the declining welfare fraud prosecution rate in the context of neoliberal welfare reform. It argues that this decline is at least partially the result of the reformulation of the objects of prosecution strategies by staff responsible for their enactment. This finding highlights the importance of localized accounts of welfare administration to supplement and complicate macro analyses of the ‘criminalization of welfare’ in Western industrialized nations.

scholarly journals Overview of PROMISE

2020 ◽  
pp. 216514342098045
Author(s):  
David E. Emenheiser ◽  
Corinne Weidenthal ◽  
Selete Avoke ◽  
Marlene Simon-Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
Career Development ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Human Services ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Department Of Education ◽  
Social Security Administration ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Health And Human Services ◽  
The Social ◽  
The U.S

Promoting the Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE), a study of 13,444 randomly assigned youth and their families, includes six model demonstration projects and a technical assistance center funded through the U.S. Department of Education and a national evaluation of the model demonstration projects funded through the Social Security Administration. The Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services and the Executive Office of the President partnered with the Department of Education and Social Security Administration to develop and monitor the PROMISE initiative. This article provides an overview of PROMISE as the introduction to this special issue of Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals.

scholarly journals The Social Union after the Coalition: Devolution, Divergence and Convergence

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Scottish Independence ◽  
The Uk

AbstractIn 2009, the UK government emphasised that it was ‘deeply committed’ to the maintenance of the state's social union, embodied in a single social security system. Five years later, the future of this social union appeared less certain than at any time since the 1920s. Dissatisfaction with the ‘welfare reform’ agenda of the coalition government was a driver of support for Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum campaign. Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland Assembly failed to pass legislation to mirror the Welfare Reform Act 2012, normally a formality due to the convention of parity in social security. Despite Westminster's subsequent extension of the 2012 reforms to the region, divergence in secondary legislation and practice remains likely. This article draws on the findings of qualitative interviews with politicians and civil servants in both regions during a period covering the conclusion of the Smith Commission's work on the future of Scottish devolution and the height of a political impasse over Northern Ireland's Welfare Reform Bill that threatened a constitutional crisis. It considers the extent to which steps towards divergence in the two devolved regions have altered the UK's social union and to which the two processes have influenced one another.

scholarly journals COVID-19 and the temporary transformation of the UK social security system

2021 ◽  
pp. 026101832098679
Author(s):  
Richard Machin
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Social Security System ◽  
Security System ◽  
The Self ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Uk Government ◽  
The Uk

This commentary discusses the implications of the changes made to the social security system by the UK government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government did not veer from its programme of welfare reform. However, emergency legislation made significant concessions including: an increase in the value of the UK’s main means-tested benefit Universal Credit, more favourable eligibility rules for the self-employed, a reduced conditionality regime, and an increase in the level of housing support. This paper argues that although the UK government’s COVID-19 social security response was necessary, it did not go far enough. A temporary lifting of some prejudicial elements of the social security system was welcome but this still leaves an overly complex system characterised by unacceptable delays in payment, inadequate support for many vulnerable groups, and inconsistent experiences for recipients of different benefits.

scholarly journals Policing Welfare: Risk, Gender and Criminality

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Scarlet Wilcock
Keyword(s):  
Single Mothers ◽  
Human Services ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Interview Research ◽  
General Welfare ◽  
Welfare Fraud ◽  
Australian Department

Over the last three decades, welfare states across the West have embraced a host of new technologies and initiatives in the name of fighting welfare abuse and fraud (see Cook 1989, 2006; Wacquant 2001, 2009). Increasingly, these practices of ‘welfare policing’ are graduated according to risk; particular welfare populations considered at greater risk of welfare fraud are subject to more intense scrutiny. Drawing on interview research with compliance staff from the Australian Department of Human Services, this paper critically explores how the rationality of risk figures in the process of welfare surveillance in Australia. It pays particular attention to the ways in which risk formulations are embedded in gender and class politics, and how this has led to the characterisation of single mothers and unemployed recipients as more ‘risky’ than the general welfare population, a point that is often overlooked in the literature. But, far from being immutable, this paper also considers how the politics of risk are open to reformulation with often unexpected results.

ASSESSMENT OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY LEVEL IN THE CONTEXT OF CORONAVIRUS CONTAGION (COVID-19)

2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (6) ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
О. Skydan ◽  
◽  
О. Nykolyuk ◽  
P. Pyvovar ◽  
P. Topolnytskyi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Security Level ◽  
The Social
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