No. If you reported $0 in income on your taxes, you get nothing. There’s a minimum income to get anything back. So if you don’t work, you get nothing, so you are incentivized to find a job of some kind.

But that minimum should be quite low and attainable.

No, negative income tax usually requires that you make some money and file taxes. UBI doesn’t.

One has the intention of encouraging workforce participation. The other tries to help everyone.

A negative income that is better than that. It says, if you’re working, but only making $12k, the state will give you money so you now have $20k. (Not real numbers.)

The idea is that it incentivizes participation in the work force, with hopes that the extra money helps you get stable and move up the payscale where you may stop needing the external support.

My guess would be that they needed to get a mid-point between existing photos of the guy whose identity they stole and the guy that would show up in the video interviews.