You don’t have to look hard these days for welfare fraud—because it’s everywhere. And if there ever were a time for a spring cleaning of public assistance oversight, this is it.
The deeper you go, the more troubling it becomes, particularly in blue states that claim their systems are working just fine. Troubling reports from Massachusetts and Maine reveal it’s time to clean house.
Massachusetts
When Massachusetts State Auditor Diana DiZoglio dropped the Bureau of Special Investigations’ annual report for FY2025, it exposed nearly $12 million in public assistance fraud across thousands of cases.
Among the programs, food stamps led with more than $4.1 million in fraud. MassHealth, the state Medicaid and CHIP program, saw more than $1.3 million in fraud. Then came the rest of from FY 2026, piling on another $4.4 million. Another recent report found that more than $1 billion was spent improperly in food stamps between 2022 and 2024.
The totals are bad enough. But once you start pulling individual cases off the shelf and wiping away the dust, it’s clear this house hasn’t been cleaned in years.
A transportation company allegedly billed MassHealth more than $3 million for rides that never happened. A tiny Mattapan bodega—only 150 square feet—somehow pushed nearly $7 million in food stamp trafficking, ringing up half a million dollars a month like it was a big-box supermarket.
Then there’s identity fraud. One man living illegally in the country stole a dead U.S. citizen’s identity for decades, even serving prison time under the alias. After release, he used the same alias to apply for food stamps, stealing thousands in benefits. A state employee even flagged his food stamp application with the note “Death match ???”, yet it was still approved. In total, the man stole more than $12,000 in benefits.
In 2026, fraudsters used more than 100 stolen identities to funnel food stamp funds into a restaurant supply scheme, stocking up on hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of wholesale meat—all paid entirely on the taxpayer’s dime.
Case after case, every dollar lost is money taken from people who actually need help: children, seniors, single mothers, people with disabilities. And yet the system keeps cutting checks.
Maine
Welfare fraud is so bad in Maine that the state is now getting compared to Minnesota.
An audit report for the 2025 fiscal year pulled back the curtain on Maine—and found way more than just dust in the corners. In 29 cases, food stamp benefits kept going out more than 75 days after the recipient had died. And despite paying out $382 million to nursing facilities, the state failed to complete any of the 88 required nursing home audits.
Maine was also cited for improper Medicaid payments for autism services, requiring the state to repay nearly $29 million to the federal government at the start of this year.
It gets worse. Fraudsters operating from outside the state siphoned off at least $76,000 in food stamp benefits from around 300 Maine households. In MaineCare, a single provider was flagged in three separate audits for overbilling the system by more than $1 million. Regulators eventually stepped in to suspend payments, but only after years of overbilling.
It’s the same story as Massachusetts: The deeper you clean, the more of a mess you find.
A Few Simple Housekeeping Reforms Will Clean Up Welfare Fraud
Cleaning house does not require a total reinvention of the system, but it does require the kind of routine upkeep reasonably expected when millions of dollars of public money is on the line. Taxpayers deserve to know their hard-earned tax dollars are actually doing what lawmakers promised they would do.
States can start with the most obvious tools, such as routine cross-checks against death records, incarceration databases, wage data, and employment systems. If someone is dead, in prison, or earning income that makes them ineligible, benefits shouldn’t keep flowing.
Stronger identity verification at enrollment would stop much of this fraud up front—especially in cases involving stolen or fake identities that slip through weak screening.
States can also close the “Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility” loophole, which allows states to push millions of ineligible people into food stamps and leads to payment errors. USDA data shows more than eight in 10 payment errors are made to homes that enrolled through this pathway.
And eligibility cannot be treated as a one-time checkbox. Regular redeterminations must take place to actually verify income, residency, and household status.
Welfare programs in New England are due for a deep clean. Until states enforce these basic safeguards, welfare programs will continue losing millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudsters, losing public trust, and leaving fewer resources for the people who actually need help.
It’s time to stop ignoring the mess—and start cleaning it up.
