At least $191 billion in pandemic unemployment benefits could have been improperly paid, with a “significant portion” attributable to fraud, according to a new estimate from the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.
That’s up from the office’s projection last year of at least $163 billion in improper payments.
The updated estimate was released Wednesday as part of a House Ways and Means Committee hearing entitled, “The Greatest Theft of Taxpayer Dollars – Unchecked Unemployment Fraud.”
House Republicans, who gained control of the chamber last month, are highlighting the widespread fraud that permeated the Covid-19 relief programs that Congress enacted in the early years of the pandemic. The House Oversight Committee held a lengthy hearing last week about fraud in two pandemic business assistance measures, the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan, as well as in the enhanced jobless benefits.
At the Ways and Means Committee hearing, GOP lawmakers repeatedly called out the size of the fraud, the loss to taxpayers and the trouble the theft has wrought on employers and Americans whose identities were stolen. Many, however, agreed with their Democratic peers that the enhanced jobless benefits were needed when the economy tanked at the start of the pandemic.
“While many Americans who actually qualified for these benefits were left struggling to reclaim their benefits and their identity, upwards of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been stolen,” said Missouri Rep. Jason Smith, who chairs the committee.
The pandemic relief packages that created these programs in 2020 passed Congress with bipartisan support and were administered that year by the Trump administration.
The extent of the fraud in the pandemic jobless benefits program is not yet known, and estimates vary…
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