by Stephen Dinan at The Washington Times
States paid out billions of dollars in pandemic unemployment claims to more than 200,000 applicants whose Social Security numbers indicated they were dead, according to an inspector general’s audit.
Nearly 1 million more claims were paid to Social Security numbers that were submitted in multiple states. That’s another indication of fraud because the law allowed someone to claim the enhanced pandemic unemployment benefits in a single state at one time.
The Labor Department’s inspector general said 1.7 million more claims were paid to people who filed from “suspicious email addresses.”
All told, the claims accounted for more than $45 billion in potentially bogus unemployment payments during the first two years after the onset of the pandemic, the audit concluded.
Carolyn R. Hantz, an assistant inspector general, said that’s nearly three times the estimate issued in June 2021.
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