[deaux]

This is a complete non-issue in basically every wealthy country bar potentially the US, all five things you named are already known to the government at all times. They also apply the exact same way to any other scheme, there's nothing new about it.

[mike_hearn]

Quite a few governments have trouble verifying identity reliably. But to the extent they can do it, it's because there are lots of people employed to do so. The UBI thesis outline above is that you can find the money to pay for it by eliminating all those job roles from the government, so you can't use their existence to justify UBI as affordable.

[deaux]

Let's look at other wealthy countries with large economies.

Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan..

Which of these have trouble verifying identity reliably, to the extent that it would be a meaningful obstacle to UBI?

[mike_hearn]

Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.

But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification.

The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there, and it's an island. There's no centralized identity scheme and during COVID more people came forward for vaccination in some age bands than theoretically existed at all.

Germany fails at reliably verifying that people who turn up for a language test as part of naturalization are the same people being given citizenship: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/69787/germany-police-ar...

All countries struggle with basics like "is the recipient of the welfare dead". Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/25/italian-man-dr...

Paying out money to dead people is a very common problem. Here's an EU report on all the basic ways countries get defrauded by failing to track basic facts about identities:

https://www.ela.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2025-03/SSC_fi...

"Common fraud and error cases include falsified documents (birth, marriage and death certificates), identity fraud and falsified non-payment certificates"

Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.

[tonyedgecombe]

>Here's a specific case where Italy didn't notice it should stop paying out a state pension (a form of UBI) for years after death, with the fraudster only getting busted when he tried to dress up as his own mother

I assume you want to stop the state pension as well then?

[deaux]

None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.

> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.

It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.

Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.

Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.

[bombcar]

> Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.

Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.

It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.

[swiftcoder]

Most EU countries have national IDs, so the "only receive it once" is a solved problem.

The "still paying dead people" problem exists in the current pension system, so we already have bureaucracy in place to solve that one (yes, it's not 100% accurate, but it works sufficiently well en masse) so no need for new bureaucracy there.