Comment by pessimizer

> Why would you assume that all groupings of people commit welfare fraud at the same rate?

What's the alternative? It's an unattainable statistic, the people who get away with crime. Instead, what ends up getting used is the fraud rates under the old system, or ad hoc rules of thumb based in bigoted anecdotes.

So instead you delcare that you don't think that ethnicity is in and of itself a cause of fraud. Even if there may be any number of characteristics that tend to indicate or motivate fraud that are seen more in one specified ethnicity than another (poverty, etc.), and even though we should expect that to lead to more fraud. We can choose to say that those characteristics lead to fraud, rather than the ethnicity, and put that out of scope.

Then we can say that this algorithm isn't meant to solve multiculturalism, it's meant hopefully not to exacerbate the problems with it. If one wants to get rid of weird immigrants, non-whites, or non-Christians, just do it, instead of automating a system to be bigoted.

Also, going after the marginal increase of rates of fraud through defining groups that represent a small portion of the whole is likely to be a waste of money. If 90% of people commit fraud at a 5% rate and 10% commit it at a 10% rate, where should you be spending your time?