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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

The unemployment schemes in Colorado and California have been a total disaster. I received a unemployment debit card in the mail - as well as a claim number. Called the state, filed a FTC report, and called the bank. None of them really cared or did anything about it.

In California - the scale of the graft was so bad that they have had to pause the program multiple times.

https://abc7.com/unemployment-california-edd-backlog-ca-wher...

Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?

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Apparently it is.

I’m a bit surprised at CO being incompetent, and I’d like to hear more. Generally my observation has been that states with one party rule have been less effective than states where both parties have to compete for the approval of the electorate. Based on the last time I lived in CO, I would’ve put it in the latter category.

This happened to me in CO. I received two debit cards in the mail earlier this Summer to a previous address, one for the one CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits, one for an Internet-only bank based out of CA. I think the fraudster got my info from CO's voter registration record, which is public by default. The address on there hasn't been updated.

I had to fight the CA bank over the course of several weeks before they would close my account, and only after I had filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Pro tip: do this for any financial disputes; financial firms will be very responsive to your issues.

I also called the bank CO uses to distribute unemployment benefits and they were much more amenable to my request to close the account.

For CO's part, the only link they provided on the CO Dept of Labor's site to report fraud (a Google form) had language to basically say that I am reporting myself as the fraudster and I would be subject to perjury in filing the report. For obvious reasons, I didn't fill it out. (It took them months to change the form.) I then called their main phone number and the only way I could talk to anyone was to schedule a callback 2-3 months later.

Ended up freezing all of my credit bureau accounts.

BTW, I don't place this fault entirely on CO. It was a hectic and uncertain time and they were trying to distribute funds into people's hands as quickly as possible. I don't expect them to be able to change such a complicated process overnight, or even months. It's a clear example of fraudsters being well ahead of regulators.

I know the form that you mention for reporting fraud in CO. Even better than the fact that it is a google form, is that is also asks for your Social Security Number.

My mom got an unemployment card (US Bank handles it in CO) in the mail and she’s never worked; she’s a disabled senior. My dad called the bank and they didn’t care, and he called the state and they didn’t care either. This was around 3 weeks ago

They only care come tax time or years later when they try to accuse you of fraud. Sadly I've seen it happen and it's pure hell for the person, especially when they tried to make it right from the beginning.

I’ll be curious to see analysis on which states performed better here.

But to be fair to CO, there is a good faith reason for governments to not care if they send cards to extra Americans. So long as the federal money printer is still running, spreading money around to Americans will keep the economy alive during the pandemic. Who cares if you give a bit of extra to people who don’t deserve it? Chances are they’ll spend it on local food and what not which’ll help keep other people off unemployment. This is especially true in cases where speed is of the essence, since you’d happily accept some level of errors to get the aid out immediately.

CO has been one party now for the last eight years or so - and it's beginning to show.

We moved into a new house a month ago, after we lost our old one in a fire. Since we've been at the new address, we've received probably 50 letters from Unemployment addressed to many obviously fake names. About half look like they contain checks. We're trying to get in touch with our state unemployment office, but they're nearly impossible to contact right now.

> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?

This is the question put to the voters at every election, and at every election the voters vote no to this type of government. So it isn't too much to ask, but it isn't what the people want.

I would say that that option doesn't tend to appear on the ballots.

Well, if you're not part of the solution...

https://runforsomething.net/

It just seems that asking antiquated unemployment systems to handle a huuuge increase in users in a time of pandemic where employees are getting sick or staying home just seems like a monumental scaling task.

I still believe that in times of crisis it's easier to go for a simple solution (just giving automatic, direct, unconditional cash to people) than to try to make a complex solution even more complex (changing the rules on who is considered unemployed, where millions now had to figure out how to use a system they've never used before).

Why couldn't they just take that $600 extra per week and distribute it to every adult in the country?

That's 9 trillion dollars worth of money.

Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.

Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.

> That's 9 trillion dollars worth of money.

I'm not sure how you're getting 9 trillion dollars. If there's approximately 250M adults in the US, at $600/week/adult, that would be $150B/week, or $600B/month. So far, over the course of 10 months, that would be $6T.

Also, that would be the max amount so far and could ask people who don't need the money to either opt out of receiving it or to donate it to an org or person they think needs it.

> Each party is dedicated to making sure that their constituents and only their constituents get money. After all, if the other guys can write endless checks for you, why on earth would they vote for the other guy.

Fair points. I think often political parties can get so insular they miss the point that for some problems, we are all on the same team.

> Also, sooner or later the US dollar's reserve status will disappear, and all of a sudden, all of the money supply we have flushed into the economy will manifest as inflation.

I don't know too much about what you mean here regarding the reserve status and how it prevents inflation, but I'm curious to learn more, so thank you for mentioning that.

Do they have to also steal the debit card for this scam to work? I'm a little confused with how they get money out of this if the debit cards go to your real address.

I suspect they would have control of the account that the state set up to distribute benefits since they had enough information to file the claim in the first place; but the non-mailing contact info would be email and phone number that they control. Once the funds have been distributed, they'd be notified and then make the transfer to the second account set up at another bank. From there...poof...

This is probably why a second bank account was opened up in my name. This bank's KYC controls were so lax that they didn't even bother to do a credit inquiry on me, which would have resulted in a notice to me from a credit monitoring service that I use.

We should hire the Swiss or Dutch to do it for us- they at least have competent local governments.

> Is it too much to ask for a government that both governs and is actually competent?

Evidently yes. They can barely govern let alone manage technical infrastructure. Just look at the abysmal vaccine roll-out. 9 months to plan for it; that's an eternity in the software development world where we're constantly faced with logical and logistical issues on the daily. We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months? I don't buy any of their excuses. It's just sheer incompetence and it makes me so mad.

That's not to say they don't have challenges. Outdated systems, obsolete programs, hell even outdated employees; I know so many rejects that end up managing government systems because they couldn't cut it in corporate. One of them is a good friend of mine. He got let go when he tried to replace a modern web-app with a WinForms app. He's actually a very good person and intelligent, but a horrible dev and I've no idea how he ever got into software development, but the government gig he has loves him.

EDIT: here's another user post in this thread that somewhat echoes my last paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25586066

> We can have millions of people streaming gigabytes of data all at once, millions of people submitting their tax returns, millions of packages being delivered every hour and yet we couldn't pull this off in 9 freakin months?

That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.

You might say that rolling out the vaccine is trivial in comparison. But the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.

They new it since January

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25334140

> That streaming wasn't rolled out instantly. It took years of building network infrastructure to get to this point.

In its inception yes, because that was new. It's much much quicker now and certainly far quicker than 9 months. Vaccinating people is not new and the technology to assist in making that process smooth is also not new. What's new is the restrictions upon which the vaccine can be stored at certain temps and the scale at which they can produce the vaccines. Neither of which are really logistical problems, at least not in the areas they're currently falling short on. Which brings me to:

> the vaccine requires building a minus-80-degree cold chain. That's... not a trivial task.

That's not where it's failing though. They knew that part well ahead of time and knew where to distribute them. The failure is occurring at other junctions along the way. In fact at Stanford, one of the biggest issues was a software algorithm (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stanford-apologizes-doc...)

In a functioning democracy the top bosses are ultimately the voters. The voters are free to reject the next slate of incumbents coming up for re-election and choose individuals that express technical command of policy.

Not really. The only elections that really matter are the primaries. In California and CO, once you have that locked up, the party machinery will make sure that no other canonicate gets elected.

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