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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the areas where Americans see their own decrepit government infrastructure and extrapolate that all developed nations struggle with the same basic things.

I lived for 35 years in Finland, and the government there has absolutely no problems verifying who’s a person. If Finland wanted to implement UBI, it could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow. Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.

Nobody needs crypto or a VC-funded eyeball scanner to get there, it just takes political will.

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Verifying personhood in America is not even a problem. The tax authorities are in the process right now of sending money to many (most?) Americans in the form of income tax refunds. There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent, despite the fact that they are specifically payments to individuals.

> There is no widespread concern about those payments being fraudulent

Tax refund fraud is a big problem, and the IRS, DOJ, etc have put a lot of effort into limiting it. Numbers are hard to find, but in 2013 it seems there was $30 billion in fraud, or around 10% of all refunds, with about $6 billion unrecovered.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but any social program must be able to accept some level of "shrinkage" in the form of fraud. Just as retail businesses generally accept some level of loss to theft, return fraud, and shipping damage. Trying to create an "ungameable" system will either create a bloated bureaucracy that no one will want to use or will require a surveillance panopticon.

That's not to say that fraud should no be investigated and prosecuted. Just that it's important to accept that you will never get fraud to zero and there will always be that one guy who's collecting benefits for a bunch of made-up identities.

10% is not very much when it comes to barriers to UBI.

If you told somebody who supported UBI that it was going to cost $1.1*X rather than $X, would they stop supporting it? If you told somebody who opposed UBI that it was going to cost $0.91*X rather than $X, would they stop opposing it?

This is a good point. By widespread concern, I meant rather that tax return fraud generally does not rise to the level of campaign issue for people aspiring to political leadership.

I'm not actually sure whether refunds or total revenue is the appropriate denominator. The IRS collected about $3 trillion dollars in revenue, which would bring the rate down to 1 percent. On the one hand, refunds are linked to the total tax paid. On the other hand, there's other kinds of tax evasion, which would raise the fraud rate up again.

$30bil is not the correct numerator, regardless of if you take total tax revenue or refunds. The $6bil is.

That number also includes people who got scammed out of their tax refund by third-parties. Worldcoin would not prevent that; if anything Worldcoin looks exactly like one of those scams.

> decrepit government infrastructure

This is a common misconception. It's a political battle regarding the extent to which the government is permitted to tabulate and link the various details of people's lives.

> could start sending money to resident citizens’ bank accounts tomorrow

That ability implies keeping and regularly querying detailed information about individuals that many here aren't comfortable with.

> Paper checks and other American-style 19th century banking relics are simply not a thing.

The system isn't as bad as you seem to be making out. Using a credit card without a chip is effectively the same thing. It's simply a claim that a numbered account has agreed to transfer you funds. Lying about that is fraud and your financial institution will have identifying details about you.

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