How Denmark’s Welfare State Became a Surveillance Nightmare
upstart writes:
Denmark's Public Benefits Administration employs hundreds of people who oversee one of the world's most well-funded welfare states. The country spends 26 percent of its GDP on benefits-more than Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It's been hailed as a leading example of how governments can support their most vulnerable citizens. Bernie Sanders, the US senator, called the Nordic nation of 6 million people a model for how countries should approach welfare.
But over the past decade, the scale of Denmark's benefits spending has come under intense scrutiny, and the perceived scourge of welfare fraud is now at the top of the country's political agenda. Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark's famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground.
It has become an article of faith among the country's right-wing politicians that Denmark is losing hundreds of millions of euros to benefits fraud each year. In 2011, KMD, one of Denmark's largest IT companies, estimated that up to 5 percent of all welfare payments in the country were fraudulent. KMD's estimates would make the Nordic nation an outlier, and its findings have been criticized by some academics. In France, it's estimated that fraud amounts to 0.39 percent of all benefits paid. A similar estimate made in the Netherlands in 2016 by broadcaster RTL found the average amount of fraud per benefit payment was 17 ($18), or just 0.2 percent of total benefits payments.The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. She has tripled the number of state databases her agency can access from three to nine, compiling information on people's taxes, homes, cars, relationships, employers, travel, and citizenship. Her agency has developed an array of machine learning models to analyze this data and predict who may be cheating the system.
Documents obtained by Lighthouse Reports and WIRED through freedom-of-information requests show how Denmark is building algorithms to profile benefits recipients based on everything from their nationality to whom they may be sleeping next to at night. They reveal a system where technology and political agendas have become entwined, with potentially dangerous consequences.
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