“As we emerge stronger from this crisis, I am also redoubling my efforts to prosecute the thieves who stole relief money meant to keep staff and small businesses afloat during the pandemic,” Biden said in his State of the Union address Tuesday night. , let’s triple our fraud strike force to prosecute those offenders, double the statute of limitations for those crimes, and crack down on identity theft through criminal syndicates seeking to borrow billions of dollars from the American people. “
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President Biden has called for a crackdown on COVID fraud, and his management has said at least $191 billion has been lost due to false jobless claims. Photographer: Nathan Howard/Bloomberg Getty Images
According to Larry Turner, inspector general of the Department of Labor, the federal government’s flood of COVID relief cash in 2020 outpaced the state agencies tasked with distributing it. He said COVID had created a “perfect storm” for fraud, as other people were allowed to self-certify they were eligible for pandemic unemployment assistance (PUA), which went to millions of others who were historically ineligible for unemployment benefits.
“Relying only on applicants’ self-certifications without evidence of eligibility and salary for the first nine months of the program has made the PUA program incredibly vulnerable to abusive payments, adding fraud,” Turner said in his remarks to the Ways and Means Committee.
Turner said the overall abusive unemployment insurance payment rate has been above 10 percent for the past two decades. But after the COVID hit, the abusive payment rate was much higher, between 18. 71% and 21. 52%.
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Unemployment claims are administered across states but overseen by the Department of Labor, headed by Secretary Marty Walsh. (Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc Getty Images) (Tom Williams)
Applying this rate to the $888 billion paid in federal and state unemployment benefits during the pandemic means that “at least $191 billion in UI bills from the pandemic may have been irrelevant bills, with a significant portion attributable to fraud,” Turner said in his remarks.
He said that figure is likely a low estimate, as the out-of-point pay rate for pandemic-era unemployment systems “is likely to exceed 21. 52 percent. “
At the same hearing, Michael Horowitz, who chairs the Justice Department’s OIG Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, said fraud was endemic because the state hard work agencies that administer unemployment insurance (UI) were not ready to handle the flood of claims. . .
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It’s unclear how much wasted money can be recovered, despite Biden’s efforts for accountability. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo)
“Internal controls within SWA’s unemployment systems were either reduced to manage influx or simply not effective enough to stumble upon the higher levels of fraud that are occurring,” he said. He also gave several examples of fraud in various states.
“A report by the Arizona Auditor General found that the Arizona SWA paid $1. 6 billion in federal unemployment insurance to Americans who used stolen identities in fiscal year 2020,” Horowitz said.
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“Michigan SWA data revealed that it paid $3900 million in overpayments to ineligible claimants,” he added. plaintiffs. “
Pete Kasperowicz is a politician at Fox News Digital.