A watchdog report says a Minnesota state agency’s inadequate oversight of a federal program that was meant to provide food to kids created the opportunities that led to the theft of $250 million in one of the country’s largest pandemic aid fraud cases.
The balance is to find fraud where it is worth it to. Going after Brett Favre may cost $100k but that could bring in $1 million. Meanwhile going after hundreds of poor people may bring in only $100k but cost $1 million. Not going after people like Favre means richer people will commit big fraud. Also, tackling a few cases of big fraud that is going to get a lot of publicity is going to be much more effective at preventing future fraud than going after 100s of people committing small amounts of fraud that nobody will hear about. An example of this is the IRS. Despite the bottom 50% of earners having almost zero chance of being audited, they still by and large pay the taxes they owe. That is because they hear about large cases of tax fraud being prosecuted (even though rates of that that are absurdly low).
So you are correct in that the rate of going after fraud for poorer people should not be zero but unless they are taking many thousands of dollars, it simply is not worth it to dig deeper into. And honestly I care very little about someone making $20k getting an extra $1000 that they should not have. That person could actually use that. Brett Favre’s fraud was 900x worse than that and his life would not be changed at all without that money.