I will say if you think this is bad, you ought to read about Washington State’s loss of $650M to organized cyber crime: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/auditor-state-unem...
I'm always a little suspicious of claims of benefit fraud that aren't backed up by court cases. They're very easy to inflate. Someone loses their job, fills in a form incorrectly, gets paid, the error is discovered a year later: was there really fraudulent intent, or is it just the combination of means-testing and the difficulty of discovering someone's true circumstances?
The number is mostly so large because it's 10% of an even bigger number, the amount CA pays in unemployment claims, which is not in dispute.
It is not at all comparable to Finland, and it is completely comparable to Finland
Finland via Nokia is quite high-tech in places; many people are poor; Finland unemployment system is not at all like California EDD; high-tech is available to the unemployment benefits people to implement payments, but do they use it?
Personally I care a lot about the Scandinavian lands even though I live in California. It is really interesting to me to hear comparisons of California to Finland. Both systems of government are complex and unique, so superficial comparisons certainly have a lot of hidden detail. People on YNews are uniquely capable with high tech so real inquiry here might lead to something interesting.
The US doesn’t (although by choice) and trying to prevent fraud without identity infrastructure seems hard.
The police officer handling fraud I talked to said he was getting a lot of a calls about this kind of fraud.
so admittedly having only read the article, I'm familiar with the theory that there's a number of fraud organizations out there that were in possession of the most vital personal data (name/DOB/SSN) that submitted false claims in 2020 during the earliest stages of the covid19 response, and got payments redirected to money mule ACH deposit accounts.
this happened in more locations than just WA.
one of the sketchiest things you can find on the internet, if you take time to research it, is the number of scammers posting "job openings" for things like a "accounts processing executive" for full WFH jobs. a certain percentage of gullible or entry level people who are too naive to know better fall for it. the general concept is to create a legit US domestic bank account that can receive ACH transfers and then forward the money onward somewhere else. usually ending up in some form of overseas account or cryptocurrency from which it cannot be retrieved.
The ESD Commissioner job was handed out as a political patronage gift. The person who was running the show has "failed upward" and is now in Washington DC.
One-party government sucks. "Yeah but the other party is worse" is irrelevant.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/how-democ...
0: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/790192972/washington-legislat...
The state sent out a letter pretty quick, and I filed to stop this within a few weeks. I have no idea how much was stolen with my name, or how much was recovered later
At the time, I would prefer the state to err on the side of paying quickly for those suddenly out of work in a pandemic, but if the state paid almost $50m for a system to stop fraud that just didn’t work right, then perhaps a refund and legal recourse is in order.
But I think a lot of the US, myself included, opposes central identity.
Therefore we are in our own self made hole.
There will be a few edge cases (disabled), though after a few prosecutions the fraud will mostly stop.
Accounting for population size, Washington State's loss is still more than a hundred times as big.
> All told, the imposter and fraud claims represented $646.8 million in misappropriated benefits. (Not all the imposter claims were paid; many were stopped by ESD before funds went out.) Of that, the state has recovered $370 million, the audit stated.