by John Solomon at Just the News
The Labor Department believes nearly $1 out every $5 it doles out for unemployment benefits is fraudulent, erroneous or unjustified, a record of failure so egregious it violates a federal payments integrity law and likely cost taxpayers more than $78 billion in losses last year alone, according to a new audit.
The Labor Department inspector general reported this week that the agency’s record of improper unemployment insurance program payments doubled from about 9.17% in the last year of the Trump administration in 2020 to 18.78% in the first year under Joe Biden in 2021.
The performance was so bad it violated three of the six tenets of the U.S. Payment Integrity Information Act, a federal law passed in 2019 to rein in errant federal spending and ensure agencies stay below 10% in bad payments, the inspector general reported.
“The U.S. Department of Labor did not meet the requirements for compliance with the Payment Integrity Information Act for FY 2021,” the audit concluded.
“DOL did not meet the established FY 2021 UI improper payment reduction target rate of 9.00 percent that was published in the DOL FY 2020 OMB payment integrity data call,” according to the internal watchdog. “DOL also did not demonstrate improvement to the UI improper payment rate from the actual rate in FY 2020.”
The large failure rate likely cost taxpayers about $77.26 billion in…
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