Welfare Fraud Control and the Anthropology of Credit and Debt

This paper explores surveillance practices carried out by public “welfare fraud controllers” in Denmark. Taking inspiration from the anthropology of credit and debt, the paper discusses money as a moral third supposed to regulate encounters between recipients and donors of social security.

Ongoing political pressures have assigned greater priority to uncovering and cracking down on welfare fraud in Denmark. As the Danish welfare state has undergone sweeping digitalization, welfare fraud control work has been split into two: decentral municipalities, insisting on investigative practices requiring physical co-presence with citizens and on the criticalness of “locally” sensitive knowledge, and a central agency (“Payout Denmark”), monitoring and policing benefit ineligibility via semi-automated digital data collection done remotely. My ethnographic material is saturated by mutual expressions of self-legitimation and other-directed denunciation (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) based on the respective party’s preferred methods of surveillance. Payout Denmark has latched onto media controversy regarding systematic, intrusive observations – popularly, “duvet lifting” – carried out by some municipalities, claiming that their own, politically sanctioned, mode of fraud detection succeeds in unmasking the secret intentions of welfare recipients in a respectable, optimal, and purely objective manner. Such framings obscure the moral foundations of Payout Denmark – and the fact that the surveillance operations of the two institutions are underpinned and animated by identical emic conceptions of money. The parties share a conception of widespread ‘financial evasiveness’ (Peebles, 2012) where citizens are perpetually at work of developing and disseminating new “recipes of fraud,” ultimately dooming a moral economy where the exchange of money is constrained by ‘deservingness’ (Tošić & Streinzer, 2022). Taking inspiration from the anthropology of credit and debt, I propose to conceive money as a moral third, supposed to mediate the engagements between the state and its citizens.