Fraudulent Lockdown-Era Unemployment Payments May Amount To $60 Billion, Government Watchdog Says

Fraudsters It is possible that the thieves may have taken up to $60 billion from various sources. unemployment By legislation, insurance programs lockdownAccording to a report The Government Accountability Office.

The state workforce agencies are responsible for managing unemployment programs and have reported $4.3 billion in fraud between April 2020 – June 2022. Another measure of fraud is the potential for fraud in cases flagged as such by the Labor Department. This could lead to $45 billion in fraudulent payments from March 2020 through April 2022. Extrapolating another low-bound estimate by the agency, which stated that at least 7.6% regular unemployment insurance payments were fraudulently made, would lead to a conservative estimate of $60 trillion.

“Current measures and estimates do not reflect the full extent of fraud, but they do provide important insights on fraud risks,” According to a post The Government Accountability Office. “And while fraud risks increased as a result of the pandemic, some will remain long after if not addressed.”

Between April 2020 and September 2022, $878 billion was spent on all unemployment insurance programs. “The unprecedented demand for benefits and the need to implement the new programs quickly increased the risk of financial fraud,” The agency did not stop.

The Department of Justice has been trying to recover fraudulently obtained taxpayer money. One example cited by the report noted a former state workforce agency employee who used others’ identities to submit nearly 200 fraudulent applications; the individual was ordered to pay $4.3 million in restitution and will spend over five years in prison. An individual submitted 300 applications using stolen identities. He was sentenced to more than three years imprisonment after he paid $1.6 million.

A rapper is another example of fraud in unemployment insurance. boasted The music video features his scheme, along with several former and current IRS employees. abused They can use their position to access the funds.

Wider numbers of economic stimulus funds misappropriated indicate that there is a higher percentage of resources lost. The Labor Department estimates The $163 billion in unemployed insurance benefits “could be improper, with a significant portion being attributed to fraud.” Blake Hall, ID.me CEO predicted The sum of $400 billion (or half the amount of unemployment money) was ultimately stolen.

Multiple reports were issued by House Republicans in the Ways and Means Committee requests For hearings on fraud in the last two years, Democrats have consistently blocked The legislators say that the lawmakers have accepted the request to investigate the extent of fraud.

“American families, whose wages have eroded under President Biden’s inflation crisis, have watched as hundreds of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars were lost to criminal activity and fraud because Democrats refused to acknowledge the problem and repeatedly rejected Republican efforts to put basic safeguards in place to protect against this activity,” Jason Smith, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (R-MO), stated in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Congressional Democrats walked away from their oversight responsibilities of getting to the bottom of how this happened, what they could do to prevent it, and even how much has fully been lost, leaving criminals to profit off the backs of taxpayers.”