A/66/265 them with the assistance they need to obtain sustainable, productive and decent work.42 57. To ensure that beneficiaries comply with conditions and requirements, States often subject them to intensive examinations and intrusive investigations. Social benefit administrators are empowered to interrogate beneficiaries about a wide range of personal issues and to search their homes for evidence of fraudulent activity.43 Beneficiaries are required to report regularly and disclose excessive amounts of information whenever it is demanded of them. In some countries, they must even submit to mandatory screening for drug use. They must also give their consent to authorities to scrutinize every aspect of their lives and to question their friends, colleagues and acquaintances.44 Beneficiaries are encouraged to watch each other and report abuses to programme administrators through anonymous channels. These intrusive measures undermine beneficiaries’ personal independence, seriously interfere in their right to privacy and family life, make them vulnerable to abuse and harassment, and weaken community solidarity. 58. The introduction of biometrics to social benefits systems means that in some States, beneficiaries must submit to facial recognition technology, finger imaging and iris scans.45 These mechanisms give States extensive power and discretion to monitor and interfere in the lives of beneficiaries. The information obtained is frequently made accessible to other authorities for purposes other than those for which it was given, without beneficiaries’ consent.46 Such practices seriously threaten the protection of personal data and the right to access and control one’s personal information. 59. Surveillance policies often treat beneficiaries like criminals and make them feel guilty, anxious and ashamed. While some mechanisms of control are necessary, they must comply with the requirements of reasonableness and proportionality. For example, evidence shows that the range of control and surveillance mechanisms employed by States in administering social benefits is clearly disproportionate to the prevalence of social benefit fraud. The overpayment of social benefits is often caused by administrative errors on the part of the State, rather than fraud by the beneficiary.47 Where beneficiaries are responsible for overpayment, it is far more likely to be due to error than to fraud, and when fraud does occur, is it usually opportunistic, low-level fraud with respect to small, subsistence amounts of money. However, policymakers represent social benefit fraud to be a pervasive problem, channelling considerable resources to combat it. Political rhetoric disproportionately focuses on social benefit fraud over taxation fraud, the cost of which is a far greater __________________ 42 43 44 45 46 47 11-44449 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 23; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, art. 6. Falkiner v. Ontario (Ministry of Community and Social Services) (2002), 59 O.R. (3d) 481 (C.A.), Factum of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, p. 5. Ibid. For example, India is in the process of rolling out the Unique Identification Authority of India scheme, whereby individuals will be allocated a unique identity number tied to biometric data. See the Unique Identification Authority of India, “What is Aadhaar?” available at http://uidai.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57&Itemid=105. See, for example, Anemona Hartocollis, “Concern for vast social services database on the city’s neediest”, The New York Times, 16 June 2011. Tamara Walsh and Greg Marston, “Benefit overpayment, welfare fraud and financial hardship in Australia”, Journal of Social Security Law, vol. 17, No. 2 (2010), p. 101. 17