Even this conservative Supreme Court will not find it okay for anyone to demand that a welfare recipient must (if they didn't agree they were stricken from benefits) allow random searchs of their living space. If they do then this country's descent into gestapo-ism will literally make me feel sick to my stomach. There are many other ways to prevent fraud.

Spending time and money to raid people's homes on a "suspicion" of welfare fraud is ridiculous. Period. It is a set-up for abuses and only meant to scare people, not only those who commit fraud, but all welfare recipients. Very Republican, but still anti-American.

Should every student receiving a government loan for school expect the "verifiers" to make a home visit? How about Veteran's benefits? The victims of Katrina? Hey, how about taxpayers. God knows more fraud appears there than in the welfare system.

C'mon folks. We've got much bigger problems in this world than welfare fraud and rules are already on the books to prevent it. When I was a welfare worker, I had to document everything, have a home visit (not a random search), and I reported anything irregular to the investigative unit in our office. The cases referred there were miniscule compared to our caseload.

This whole thing is yet another smokescreen to turn our attention away from the rampant corruption infecting our government at the highest levels.

Crime is crime. If you somehow feel less emotional about tax fraud than you do about welfare fraud, it is possible your sense of ethics is a little skewed.

Would you advocate home and business inspections for every taxpayer in the US, just to be sure none of them might be commiting fraud? They are after all stealing money from the national treasury.

Laws protecting us from pre-emptive search and seizure have to be preserved because by extension they could lead to all of us.

Tax evasion (fraud) is not just a current problem, but a growing one. I personally know people who haven't paid taxes in years. They work under the table, and they lie about their business expenses. I also know someone who called the IRS because their ex-husband's fraud about his income was affecting their child support payments. He hadn't filed taxes in 7 years. The IRS said they had a huge file on that person and would eventually get around to addressing the problem. That was several years ago and no one has done anything.

From the IRS.gov website: "Recent research by Graetz (1999) and Schneider and Enste (2000) concludes that global tax evasion is on the rise. However, the authors differ in their assessments as to what is causing this trend. Schneider and Enste cite a rising tax and regulatory burden as the reason for an expanding shadow economy among OECD countries. Graetz sees the growing complexity of Federal income tax laws as the driving factor behind increased noncompliance in the U.S. This paper suggests a third possibility: Taxpayers simply may be enjoying greater success at evasion due to a decline in transaction visibility. U.S. taxpayer data show that nonmatchable income has grown from 8.7 percent of reported AGI in
1980 to 18.4 percent in 2000. Applying constant misreporting rates for matchable and nonmatchable income from the 1988 TCMP study, taxpayer underreporting is estimated to have increased from 3.6 percent to 5.6 percent of reported AGI between 1980 and 2000.

The decline in transaction visibility appears related to the trend of widening income inequality. In the last two decades, the top 5 percent of U.S. taxpayers with the highest reported AGI accounted for over 77 percent of the increase innonmatchable income. Preliminary evidence is found for the hypothesized relationship between income inequality and a measure of tax noncompliance for asample of 23 developed and developing nations. This finding supports the view that a widening variation in taxpayer incomes, and the associated decline in transaction visibility, could be contributing to the presumed growth in taxpayer noncompliance."

(Someone said not to post PDF links on this site, but non-compliance issues and this excerpt was taken from the IRS.gov pages).