Fraud in the Workplace? Evidence from a Dependent Verification Program

Many employers have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. We evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large, single-site employer. We find that dependents were 2.7 percentage points less likely to be reenrolled in the year that DV was introduced, indicating that this fraction of dependents was ineligibly enrolled prior to the program's introduction. We show that these dependents were actually ineligible, rather than merely discouraged from re-enrollment by compliance costs.