[londons_explore]

In my view, we need to move the goalposts.

Fraud detection models will never be fair. Their job is to find fraud. They will never be perfect, and the mistaken cases will cause a perfectly honest citizen to be disadvantaged in some way.

It does not matter if that group is predominantly 'people with skin colour X' or 'people born on a Tuesday'.

What matters is that the disadvantage those people face is so small as to be irrelevant.

I propose a good starting point would be for each person investigated to be paid money to compensate them for the effort involved - whether or not they committed fraud.

[WhyIsItAlwaysHN]

Some groups will be more disadvantaged than others by being investigated. For example for welfare, I expect fraudsters to have more money to support themselves or less people to support (unless the criteria for welfare is something unexpected). So I'd say that there also needs to be more protections than just providing money.

Nevertheless the idea of giving money is still good imo, because it also incentivizes the fraud detection becoming more efficient, since mistakes now cost more. Unfortunately I have a feeling people might game that to get more money by triggering false investigations.