What Happens To Your Data When You Apply For Public Benefits?
Excerpt:
Governments have a legitimate interest in protecting public programs, but fraud prevention is not the same as a license to repurpose benefit data. Identity theft, duplicate payments and administrative errors cost taxpayers money and undermine confidence in programs on which millions of people rely. Proposed safeguards shouldn’t make catching actual fraud harder. A 2022 Center for Law and Social Policy analysis by Parker Gilkesson, a former SNAP caseworker, found that intentional SNAP fraud is rare. It accounts for 0.1% of SNAP issuances, and the total overpayment rate is 0.9%. Infrastructure designed to prevent fraud has grown much larger than originally intended.
Read the full Forbes article here.
Source URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chastity-murphy/2026/08/25/what-happens-to-your-data-when-you-apply-for-public-benefits/
