As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed,

As the saying sort-of goes: choose two, cheap, fast and free from fraud. Governments could have prevented fraud but it would have been at the expense of speed, or it would have come at huge cost. Governments chose fraud as the cost of operating a fast and cheap system for distributing money to people in need. We should consider a more traditional social security program as a point of reference for fraud levels, and for those, the most cyclical estimates of fraud in most western countries are a few percentage points — and that fraud is traditionally misrepresentation of circumstance… not identity fraud.