Parallel Systems of Control – Mimicking internal structures when monitoring of clients in Belgian welfare offices

When it comes to populations that are subjected to control by public authorities, including migration or welfare administration, research has shown that those targeted are often those marginalized, Some of the control mechanisms include regularly scheduled meetings, as well as submission deadlines for forms, certificates or other documents that do keep authorities informed but also keep those subjected to control alerted. This contribution studies the parallelism between internal monitoring and auditing those social workers within Belgian welfare offices face and the level of scrutiny and information-collection that is directed towards clients of such services. We find that the set-up of offices and the relation between social workers at the forefront of implementation and their daily faced monitoring resembles the relation between caseworkers and clients. The level of scrutiny that social workers experience being embedded in their administrative system is translated by the latter and pushed onto clients who face excessive control mechanisms hindering them to establish their rights for support. Using welfare offices in Belgium as a starting point, we ask how suspicion and truthfulness are constructed in social reports and embedded in wider state practices of immigration control, allowing for the close observation of individuals. We show how information – and therefore, suspicion, can be shared across state agencies and how paperwork practices of control are, as a result, far from neutral: rather, they reproduce vulnerabilities and impose an uneven, surveilling gaze onto certain groups.