Listening to snitches: Race/ethnicity, English proficiency, and access to welfare fraud enforcement systems

• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Spencer Headworth,Viridiana Ríos
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12176

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Listening to snitches: Race/ethnicity, English

proficiency, and access to welfare fraud

enforcement systems

Spencer Headworth

1

|Viridiana Ríos

2

1

Department of Sociology, Purdue University,

West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

2

Harvard Summer School, Cambridge,

Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence

Spencer Headworth, Department of Sociology,

Purdue University, 700 West State Street, West

Lafayette, IN 47907, USA.

Email: sheadworth@purdue.edu

Abstract

How does the state respond to members of the public

seeking to mobilize its coercive power? Focusing on

welfare fraud control units in the United States, we

examine how race/ethnicity and written English profi-

ciency affect access to systems for reporting welfare

fraud suspicions. Using a correspondence audit, we

assess fraud control authorities’likelihood of taking up

reports from Latinas and Whites with higher and lower

English proficiency. We find that fraud units are less

likely to take up lower-proficiency Whites’reports, but

that lower proficiency’s uptake-dampening effect does

not hold for Latinas. To explain the mechanisms

underlying our experimental results, we draw on

interviews with fraud investigators. The interview evi-

dence reveals the determinations of investigative prom-

ise underlying these uptake disparities. For White

reporters, English errors cue gatekeepers’preexisting

skepticism about public reporters’reliability, decreas-

ing enthusiasm for investing resources in these reports.

Reports from lower-English proficiency Latinas offer

special viability appeal, however, offsetting the nega-

tive influence on uptake probability that errors

demonstrate for White reporters. Our results shed new

light on contemporary racial/ethnic dynamics in the

US welfare system, and advance social scientific

understanding of how bureaucratic gatekeepers decide

what to do—if anything—with volunteered reports of

misconduct.

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12176

©2021 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Law & Policy. 2021;43:319–347.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo 319

1|INTRODUCTION

A variety of government agencies use incriminating information supplied by members of the

public (Natapoff, 2009; Reeves, 2017). This practice allows the state to enlist nonstate actors as

contributors to the exercise of state power (Garland, 1996; Goddard, 2012; Scoular &

O’Neill, 2007). In the prominent example of criminal law enforcement, this process is often

straightforward: having identified someone possessing incriminating information, authorities

offer the prospective informant an incentive (often a reduction in legal liability) in exchange for

disclosure (Skolnick, 1966, pp. 124–125). It is less clear, however, what factors shape authori-

ties’responses under the “volunteer model”(Bergemann, 2017), in which members of the public

approach them to report alleged wrongdoing.

Herein, we seek to understand how bureaucratic gatekeepers decide what (if anything) to do

with volunteered reports of misconduct. Specifically, we focus on what happens after members of

the public contact dedicated fraud control units within social service agencies to report suspected

welfare fraud.

1

These units’investigators are tasked with detecting, investigating, and substantiat-

ing clients’rule violations, making their immediate function closer to that of criminal justice

authorities than to nominally helping-oriented public assistance work. Intentional Program Viola-

tions (IPVs) are administrative charges that permit agencies to suspend and disqualify clients.

Some cases are also referred to prosecutors for criminal charges. Fraud unit gatekeepers’deci-

sions about what to do with incoming fraud reports shape who will be investigated for fraud, with

those investigated potentially facing a range of sanctions due to those investigations.

We examine how two categories of reporter characteristics—Latina versus White race/

ethnicity and higher versus lower apparent English proficiency—shape fraud reports’disposi-

tions. These factors are timely; recent evidence points to Latino ethnicity and language skills as

consequential linked variables in threat perceptions (Flores & Schachter, 2018) and to an

“immigrationalization”of opinions about welfare (Garand et al., 2017). Our research elucidates

how these factors shape welfare fraud control units’responses to volunteered reports of alleged

fraud.

The focal fraud units spend much of their time on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance

Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program; state-level agencies completed

nearly a million SNAP client investigations in fiscal year 2016 (Food and Nutrition

Service, 2017). While they also address other types of fraud—such as clients “trafficking”SNAP

benefits by exchanging them for cash or goods—much of what fraud workers do reduces to

boundary-work around formal eligibility categories. In investigating eligibility fraud cases, they

seek to establish that eligibility-pertinent information that clients have supplied is inaccurate,

incomplete, or outdated.

Like their counterparts in conventional law enforcement, administrative welfare fraud inves-

tigations run on information. With some jurisdictional variation, fraud investigators draw upon

an array of evidentiary resources to substantiate charges: databases; inquiries to employers,

landlords, schools, and daycares; home inspections; and interviews with neighbors and clients

themselves. This article investigates influences on these investigations’origination, focusing spe-

cifically on case referrals that begin with volunteer reporters complaining of suspected fraud.

2

Fraud units and the agencies that house them encourage such reporting; agency websites pro-

vide instructions for reporting suspected fraud online or over the phone, and local offices and

administration buildings display fraud-centered flyers and pamphlets recruiting clients as

informants.

As street-level bureaucrats

3

(Brodkin, 1997; Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003;

Soss et al., 2011a, Ch. 10; Watkins-Hayes, 2009b), fraud workers have significant discretion at mul-

tiple stages of the investigative process. Assessing incoming public reports and deciding whether to

act on them—and if so, how—are pivotal junctures of such discretionary decision-making. Fraud

units do not have the labor necessary to fully investigate every referral they receive. Like police

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