One Nation, Finding Fraud
Spencer Headworth (Author)
Chapter Two situates fraud control units as governmental entities and explains political processes’ impact on their work. Tracking the development of contemporary fraud units’ bureaucratic separation and designated investigatory and punitive function, it shows how welfare programs’ changing symbolic valence drove major legal changes. In so doing, it demonstrates how federalist dynamics influence policy implementation in programs diffused across federal, state, and local levels of government. States have substantial discretion in creating their own fraud control systems; variations in fraud’s salience help explain state-level differences. And, at the local level, investigators’ own discretion creates noteworthy variation in enforcement practice even under ostensibly uniform state fraud control policies. These variations, in turn, shape fraud control’s substantive outcomes
Chapter, 2021