It could be a bug in your SSH. There have been several examples of this over time. (You should definitely post the exact versions used at either end).
http://www.alcatelunleashed.com/viewtopic.php?t=25294
I can't work out why a remote network path would be more reliable, or any suggestion to work on that. It can be caused by buggy network boxes though...
If your Ubuntu server is recently installed and has all available updates installed, I'd be more suspicious of the software on the Mac client, that it's old and affected by some bug like this.
You could test different MACs etc. E.g.
scp -o MACs=hmac-md5
Note hmac-md5 is not considered weak (in the context of ssh) in the same way md5 is (e.g. in the context of HTTPS certificates). I expect mainly it's slower than e.g. [email protected]. However it should be better to use -etm modes if you can.
The links suggest you can prefer older options
MACs hmac-md5,hmac-sha1,[email protected],hmac-ripemd160
and it will avoid certain bugs. Once you find something you're happy with, you can configure it in /etc/ssh_config.
The Cipher could also be the problem. If you're using aes-gcm e.g. [email protected], maybe there's not a separate MAC at all. So you at least need to make sure of what ssh is doing by adding -v to your commands and looking for the MAC it says it's actually using.