Sister-in-law committing fraud, should I report it?
My sister-in-law (call her Sue) has a son who is on welfare in another province. She has given her son a credit card with a $1,500 limit, which he runs up to the maximum every month. The son does not declare this income to welfare authorities. Do I have a moral obligation to report this fraud?
Oh dear. Every now and then I write a column, and even as the words flow like salubrious honey across the page, I know I’m going to get a torrent of response from kind, gentle souls telling me I’m an idiot. This is one such.
There is nothing inherently wrong with people on welfare receiving financial gifts from members of their family.
Individual provinces have latitude to set limits on both the magnitude of those gifts and what they may be used for.
Effective Sept. 1 of this year, for example, folks receiving Ontario Works are allowed gifts of up to $10,000 per year from family members; in addition, family members may be able to help with rent, car payments or the purchase of a principal residence.
So, if Sue’s son lived in Ontario, he might well be legal under the new 2017 guidelines. You don’t tell me where he lives, so that might or might not be true in his province. But that’s certainly not for you to investigate.
More to the point, I really doubt that the son is getting rich on welfare!
Depending on where he lives in the country, his housing arrangements and so on, he might be eligible for a princely sum between $500 and $800 per month. If he had kids, he would get a little bit more. But he’s not getting rich — not even close.
So his mom is helping out. Whether or not that is the wisest decision, or whether what they’re doing is strictly legal within a particular province’s guidelines, is neither your business nor mine. If you feel that this assistance is imposing hardship on the mother or creating dependency in the son, that’s a different matter, one that you might want to discuss with her.
But that’s not the concern you’re expressing; instead, you are worried that, somehow, this family is cheating the system. And maybe they are. But the thing is, the system sucks. It is broken, has been broken for decades and shows no immediate promise of radical change. (Ontario is offering a 2-per-cent increase Oct. 1; whoopee!) It does not provide sufficient income for a person to survive, never mind live a life of dignity and purpose. It does nothing to help people out of poverty — in fact, clawback provisions destroy initiative and penalize benevolence, rather than encouraging either. It not only encourages cheating, it makes it almost mandatory.
Yeah, there might be a bit of fraud going on here. But what’s really fraudulent is pretending we’re a country, a province, a city that gives a damn about its poorest people, including children. Until this country gets serious about providing an adequate basic income for its most needful citizens, I find it hard to criticize a mother who’s helping out her kid. And I don’t think you should, either. Send your questions to star.ethics@yahoo.ca