Half of the pandemic's unemployment money may have been stolen
axios.com
axios.com
1) lots of regular working people getting suspicious notices about unemployment being filed in their name
2) high numbers of these reported cases. Even though many of those notices end up unopened (old address or dead person), many of whom get the notices don't report it (they think it's a mistake or scam), and of those who report it there's no central place to report. So the actual numbers are multiple times higher
3) reports of "viral" spreading of unemployment scams, bank employees quitting because they can't do anything about fraudsters going to banks and cashing $10,000 checks over and over, and considering how easy it is for people in prison and random small-time scammers on group chats to get this money, anyone smarter is probably way more successful.
And note that that SBA money is a whole other pot of money that's probably being scammed even harder. Similarly, they're only catching the obvious cases of fraud like people getting 10K loans for farms in the middle of Manhattan.
I've tried to bring this up a few times before but it feels hopeless (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25515646, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25258782). At the end of the day, I think people don't want to hear about problems that they can't do anything about, so they try to kill the cognitive dissonance by thinking that maybe the problem isn't as big, that it's still better a good use of the money because criminals are disadvantaged groups, etc.
The root of the issue is that politicians are applauded for nice-sounding new initiatives, but as you can imagine, the execution is the hard part. Every time there is a new initiative, it's like trying to create a whole new process, which is prone to error and cheating. Things that work fairly well in general (like income tax collection, our judicial system) have been refined over many years, and tested across all sorts of edge cases.