Pandemic Unemployment Fraud and Improper Payments Were Worse Than We Thought: Does Anyone Care?

While the media was extensively covering the debate between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, there was a government report that caught my eye. Entitled Examining Widespread Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs, this report from the majority staff on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability covered some disturbing trends regarding the pandemic-era unemployment benefits:

The percentage of fraudulent payments was in the double digits. This report puts the figure anywhere between $100 billion to around $191 billion. In percentages, that would be anywhere from 11 percent to 21 percent. For context, when I covered this topic in February 2023, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that it was about 6 percent. 

69 percent of workers received benefits that exceeded their salary and non-salary benefits. To put this in layman's terms, most recipients were paid more to not work than they were to work. I expressed my concerns in April 2020 that this would cause considerable problems, including exacerbated unemployment. It turns out that I was right. In September 2023, I covered how these benefits disincentivized people to look for work. Intuitively, it makes sense. Why look for work when you are being paid more to not work?

It is not only that there was fraud, but why the fraud was so rampant. The reasons outlined in this report were multiple, including staffing shortages, outdated IT systems, the high number of claims, and not requiring applicants to provide proof of prior employment or wages. This resulted in criminal organizations taking billions of taxpayer dollars to line their own pockets because it was that easy to defraud the U.S. government. 

What ultimately shocks me is that the government can make upwards of nearly $200 billion in fraudulent payments and no one is held accountable. If someone in the private sector had carried out a comparable level of fraud à la Enron, they would have been prosecuted and would have gone out of business. When the government does it, what is the punishment? A slap on the wrist. The government did not hold Fauci accountable for his subpar recommendations, whether that was the social distancing at six feet, school closures, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, or his obnoxious flip-flop on face masks. This is such a disservice to taxpayers. 

It is not like there are not solutions to the problem. The Oversight Committee report outlines in Section VI of their report. The GAO published a report covering recommendations last month, as does a report from the Right-leaning American Enterprise Institute released in January 2024. The problem here is our lack of accountability. We cannot look at nearly $200 billion in fraud and think it is nothing. It is that mentality that has resulted in climbing debt and having the United States' credit rating continuously downgraded. 

There are a lot of values that American society has lost sight of, but government spending and oversight thereof is certainly one of those things. It is certainly clear in a presidential race in which neither candidate is interested in restraining government spending or holding anyone accountable for the havoc that the government wreaked on the American people during the pandemic. We cannot be half-awake at the wheel of a car that is headed towards going off the cliff of insolvency. If we do not wake up (obviously, not in the destructive Far Left, woke sense) and get a hold of that wheel, we will find what was once a shining city on a hill become a hellhole that is nothing more than a shell of its former self.