Following the enactment of Ohio's 1995 welfare reform, which required welfare recipients to work or perform community service while looking for a permanent job in order to receive benefits, Arnold Tompkins, Ohio Director of Human Services, found that a "smokeout effect" had taken place, in which recipients who had been fraudulently working while receiving benefits were forced out into the open. "When you start requiring a lot of people that you didn't require before, [you find that recipients] did have jobs and things before that weren't reported income and things like that. And when you're requiring them to do 20 hours of work or 15 hours of work—they then [say]—"I can't do that because I've got another job." Tompkins estimates that as much as one-third of the drop in welfare claims in Ohio could be a result of previously undetected fraud.

†