New York State’s office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which oversees the program formerly known as welfare, may face penalties of up to $43 million for not properly verifying recipients’ incomes. By not running checks against an Internal Revenue Service database as required, the state runs the risk of giving aid to people who have incomes from other states, which would make them ineligible for benefits, the director of the Office of Family Assistance, Andrew Bush, told us.

Advocates for the poor, however, levy the opposite complaint. They say that that people who should get aid are wrongly turned away “by a rigid bureaucracy giving a benefit which our society is reluctant to give,” as Dan Friedman of the Community Service Society told us. Far from seeing the possible fine as a step in the right direction, Mr. Friedman attributes it to a “federal administration that is hostile to giving money to people in need.”

But people who are genuinely in need wouldn’t be hurt if these federal regulations were enforced. Welfare fraud wastes taxpayer dollars. There is nothing cruel about combating it.

The city and state welfare rolls have fallen by more than half since their peak in the 1990s due to both the 1996 welfare reform law and tighter enforcement of eligibility requirements. Still, sensational cases of welfare fraud emerge periodically. Remember Robert Chan, a former bond-trader who gave up a lucrative job to pursue acting? Though he owned his apartment building in Brooklyn and collected more than $11,000 a month in rent, he also helped himself to $11,617 worth of welfare and food stamps in 2002.

We have criticized the way welfare programs create a disincentive to work or to take a better-paying job. While the 1996 welfare reform effort has been a success, there’s still a fundamental incentive problem policy-makers should not ignore. But no matter how one feels about welfare, vigilance in combating welfare fraud is the least the government owes to the taxpayers who bankroll the programs.