“Those flagged as high risk are subject to special investigations where fraud controllers are empowered to visit people’s homes unannounced, count toothbrushes to guess how many people live there, question their neighbours and scour bank records.”
France’s family benefits agency has scored every one of its 13 million benefit households for more than 10 years. It took a transparency fight before the access commission to pry loose the source code. The model rewards a high income and punishes single parents, the disabled and people who struggle to pay bills. Since 2019 it started 700,000 investigations and 17 percent of them found the agency owed the recipient money. The poor get audited and the rich get a low score.