§02 · Suspicion scales inversely with power

Hold two transfers side by side and the asymmetry is not subtle.

The transfer to the powerful mortgage treatment, pension splitting, tax credits	The transfer to the powerless social assistance, disability support
Self-declared. Audited rarely, by paperwork the recipient never sees handled.	Continuous financial disclosure. Home visits, historically. Weekend suspension.
No home visit. No channel built to presume fraud.	An enforcement channel separate from the case worker. A fraud narrative to keep disproving.
Nobody visits a homeowner to confirm the mortgage.	The surveillance rises precisely as the recipient's capacity to object falls.

Nobody visits a homeowner to confirm the mortgage. Nobody routes a pension splitter to a fraud line. The surveillance intensity rises precisely as the recipient's capacity to object falls. That is the mechanism: not that the poor are more fraudulent, for which there is no support proportionate to the scrutiny, but that they are less able to impose a cost for being treated as suspects. The architecture follows the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is the person with the least power.

The amount is small. The population is small. The budget share is small. The one thing that is not small is the political safety of the target, and that is what the architecture is calibrated to. This is the move, stated as a rule, not a motive: place the transfer to the poor in the posture of a fraud risk rather than an entitlement, layer policing methods onto its administration, and mobilize the result when it is politically useful, until treating one class of citizen as presumptively guilty reads as prudent stewardship.