When you signed up for food stamps, you signed away any and all privacy rights. They will get your income tax information and bank statements whether or not you are willing to provide them. It makes one heck of a lot of sense to cooperate, and bite the bullet. You can say you did it in error, or you can say nothing or you can say here it is, I think I deserved it, nayah nah nah. It doesn't matter what you say. They can see what you did. If you were stupid enough to clam up and hire an attorney at this point (what are you doing on food stamps if you can afford this right now anyhow?) it would do nothing but make them think they had hold of a large scale professional intentional scammer and push harder to get the goods on you.
And what you did, you did. What income you made, you made, there are no ifs, buts or ands about it. There are thousands and thousands of people who think they can maybe get away with misrepresentation of their income to agencies and try it with amazing regularity. They expect it. This is not a court case YET. This is an agency investigation of possible attempted fraud. In order for you to be "in court" at all, they'd have to recommend you for prosecution to the DA. They do this with some cases, particularly the ones who cooperate least and show wholescale blatant attempts to defraud the program. They like to prosecute people that will give them the maximum exposure in the news and the ones they can make the biggest public examples of.
But as I have pointed out many times on the boards, if they prosecuted every single case of where someone misrepresented their income and attempted to defraud the needs based programs, there would be no room in the jails for any other criminals. There are thousands and thousands of people trying it, not as many as you would think who actually get away with it. Since they expect you to lie and misreport, they keep all sorts of cross matching with other governmental programs such as income tax going all the time. And people snitch on other people reporting them for welfare fraud with remarkable regularity. If you're mad at someone it's common practice if you know they're receiving public assistance to report them. That's why I strongly encourage everyone who is getting public assistance of any kind NOT to try to fudge any of their income.
They are more interested in working this out, establishing the fraud, figuring out what you were or were not entitled to. They'd like the money back, but in these programs, that is usually not very easy to get, as the people who are on them are low income in the first place. So what they tend to do is put sanctions on you, so that you cannot, because of your fraud, receive any more benefits for a fixed period of time which they will decide.
