Overview

There is an inherent trade-off between preventing fraud and abuse and ensuring access for eligible beneficiaries – what we term the access-fraud trade-off in means-tested social welfare programs. The implementation of stringent verification requirements, complex application processes, and frequent recertification procedures is typically justified on economic grounds – ensuring a sorting function with limited public resources reaching only “deserving” recipients (Bell, 2021; Heinrich et al., 2022; Herd & Moynihan, 2025; Keiser & Miller, 2020; Nichols & Zeckhauser, 1982; Nicholson-Crotty et al., 2021). Yet, as the literature on administrative burdens has documented, this approach generates substantial costs that prevent eligible individuals from receiving needed benefits (Barnes, 2020; Bell et al., 2023; Bhargava & Manoli, 2015; Giannella et al., 2024; Heinrich, 2016). This raises a fundamental empirical question: At what point does the public consider administrative burden excessive relative to its fraud prevention value? Our study addresses this question by investigating the extent to which people are willing to trade program access against fraud prevention, and under which conditions these preferences might shift.

We implemented a contingent valuation experiment (N=2,250) to quantify people’s willingness to accept potential fraud in exchange for increased access for eligible beneficiaries (Robinson et al., 2017). Our experimental design randomly assigned participants to evaluate trade-offs in either general welfare terms, or in the context of a specific program, allowing us to systematically vary psychological distance. This novel methodological application allows us to identify the precise threshold at which citizens’ preferences shift from supporting administrative burdens to opposing them -- a critical insight for policymakers charged with striking the balance between program integrity and accessibility.

Our findings reveal more nuanced patterns than suggested by conventional political narratives about welfare fraud. While fraud prevention remains a salient concern, many respondents – even among the traditionally conservative – express willingness to accept modest levels of fraud to ensure eligible beneficiaries receive assistance. Overall, respondents were willing to accept approximately 192 potentially ineligible recipients receiving benefits in exchange for 1,000 eligible beneficiaries not being excluded due to administrative burdens. While we find no evidence that psychological distance affects the trade-off for the entire sample, political affiliation emerged as a boundary condition for the effect of psychological distance. Republicans demonstrate substantially lower tolerance for potential fraud when evaluating "welfare" in general terms (accepting only about 3 additional ineligible recipients) compared to specific programs like unemployment insurance (accepting about 107 additional ineligible recipients), while Democrats exhibit preferences less consistent with our theoretical expectations.

In Figure 1 below, we present the percentage of respondents supporting reducing documentation requirements for each randomly assigned program. In line with our hypothesis, we find that respondents are less likely to support reducing documentation requirements when the program is described generally as “welfare” which likely triggers underlying cognitive frames and stereotypes compared to more concrete descriptions of programs such as SNAP, TANF, SSI, or UI.  However, these differences are not statistically distinguishable in difference of means tests.

Figure 1: Percentage of Respondents Supporting Reducing Documentation Requirements with No Increase in False Positives, by Program

In Figure 2,  we plot the randomly assigned value of unqualified individuals gaining access and the likelihood that respondents supported reducing documentation requirements. Figure 2 demonstrates that increasing the number of randomly assigned false positives from 1 to 1,000 reduces support among respondents from approximately 75 percent to 40 percent. This means that once the ratio of false positives to false negatives is 1:1, the majority of our respondents do not support reducing documentation requirements.

Figure 2: Percentage of Respondents that Support Reducing Documentation Requirements, by Randomly Assigned Number of False Positives

Study authored by Elizabeth Bell and Sebastian Jilke Funding was obtained through the University of Texas at Austin.