California’s Expanded Covid Unemployment System Corrupted by $2B in Fraud

fee.org

13 points·spaceshipslien··6 comments

Fraud detection (and California's unemployment department in general) seems to have been completely overwhelmed.

I think normally a human would review each claim (and perhaps contact the recipient) but that was simply not possible in 2020.

BofA has more scalable, automated fraud detection systems.

There are many, many people who want to steal from the government. They will do so at every opportunity. Each new government program needs to have a security component that will consume a large fraction of the total cost.

Government could build reusable fraud prevention systems, and deploy across all benefits and entitlements programs.

If banks and payment processors can do it, so can government.

I'm surprised people even do that as they would eventually be caught. Aren't there serious penalties for defrauding the government? Aren't those prisoners who got unemployment going to be punished and extend their prison sentences? The antifraud system is completely inexistent, they didn't even verify social security numbers so even babies got unemployment. That's so ridiculous..

The system where prisoners have all of their needs met (health care, dietary needs, etc) isn't sustainable. The Californian solution to this has been to release prisoners, rather than cut off these perks that many contributing members of society don't have access to.

Since fraud is a "non-violent crime." Politicians/judges in California have made the punishment of these types of crimes absurdly lax, often with early release or little-to-no time served.

a. The accounts I see are a bit more cautious in qualifying with "could". b. This would be something under a 2% fraudulent claim rate. c. The FEE seems likely to have a bias in such reporting.

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